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Date of Manufacturing or burning?

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I recently purchased some supposedly official CD-R promo acetates from the mid 90's and I was wondering if there were a way to check and see if the discs were actually burned back then or if I have fakes. Is there a program that can tell when certain CD-R's were manufactured or when the discs were burned?

Unfortunately when I look on windows explorer, I get the same date for all discs, no matter what I put in. Can anyone help?
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You can use DVDInfoPro to check if the disc is a burned one. Just load the disc and press the button "media" (second from the left). The program will recognize nearly all cd/dvd media and give the name of the producer and lead-in and lead-out information, etc, but no date I think. If it's not recognized it's probably a pressed original.

Btw, how can you not tell by looking at the disc if it's a burned copy?
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Arnie, you misunderstood the question. The issue is not whether they are burned or pressed, the issue is when were they were burned.

Say for example a band is starting out, not signed to a label, they burn their demo or promo stuff onto CD-Rs. If that band then goes on to become famous, what's to say someone couldn't make a copy onto another CD-R and pass it off as the original?

digitalfreaknyc, I don't know of any software that will tell you what you want to know. The only suggestion I can make is to look for clues on the discs themselves, for example, it they are on 74min/650MB discs they are unlikely to be recent burns.

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OK. Well, you learn something everyday. :D

Anyway, I would give DVDInfoPro a chance. Maybe it will give you the production number/code of the disc and maybe that way you can find out when the disc itself was produced.
Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
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Moth3r said:

Arnie, you misunderstood the question. The issue is not whether they are burned or pressed, the issue is when were they were burned.

Say for example a band is starting out, not signed to a label, they burn their demo or promo stuff onto CD-Rs. If that band then goes on to become famous, what's to say someone couldn't make a copy onto another CD-R and pass it off as the original?

digitalfreaknyc, I don't know of any software that will tell you what you want to know. The only suggestion I can make is to look for clues on the discs themselves, for example, it they are on 74min/650MB discs they are unlikely to be recent burns.


In this case, I have a few Madonna promo CD-R's. What happens is that a lot of times things that are done "in house" are done on CD-R. THe problem is that once they get "out there," it's hard to differentiate originals from copies.

Sometimes they have stuff printed directly on the disc, sometimes it's a sticker. Sometimes it's plain. Such a pain.
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Another thing worth mentioning is if the disc was recorded on a standalone audio recorder, as opposed to being burned in a computer's CD writer, then it has to be a kind of CD-R that's specifically for audio.

Despite the fact that these discs are marketed as "optimized for audio", they are exactly the same as normal "data" CD-Rs, but just include a piece of data saying they are audio CD-Rs. (And they are more expensive because of a RIAA tax!) Standalone recorders won't record onto CD-Rs that don't have this flag.

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