First ofall is there a tool that will tell you the TRUE speed that you can burn to a CD.
I have burned my shere of cds but now I have got a 32x burner (Liteon) . Works great except when I use 32x media there are errors trying to read them. If I burn cds with 12x media it works fine. With the 32x media you can not read it it a normal cd drive, only in the burner.

If you have one of the newer recorders and it is ATIP capable then I have a little program called cdrid, that will not only tell you the speed, it will tell you who made it how much it will hold both time and megabytes, it will tell you the dye used on the disk and the speed if it is included in the ATIP info........
Also if you are talking about errors popping up while trying to read the disk to image or to copy and it starts to show error after error then you have run into what is part of the copy protection, a liteon will see this info (so will alot of other newer ones) but older ones will not because they do not read sub channel data. It may take 10 minutes to get through the errors or it may take an hour ( Alice) took that long for me....So when making copies be patient, backing up a disk is now an art form that requires the right hardware and combinations of software...............

Sounds like a very useful program, can you please share the info where we can get hold of a copy?

The download link is no more, but it is a very small program, I can up it or email it,
seems that this is the last of it, the individual that created it is not going to do anymore with it.......