Frank Davey

Okay, many thanks Guitarfxr. Your advice is much appreciated. Dang it! I was hoping to avoid reformatting. If I may permit myself a quick rant: it seems there are too many pitfalls like this one with MD software of any kind. I love my MZ-N910 - it's faithfully recorded major life events in my family (the birth of my kid, my grandfather's stories just before he died), as well as the occasional jam session. When it was stolen, I hunted until I found it in a pawn shop 50km away. But its software is fatally flawed by corporate greed and paranoia. A device like this shouldn't damage people's personal property! Enough said. Thanks to all on this excellent forum.

Yes, Macs are more secure. But I can't afford one. BTW, AVG picked up a only one trojan - and the audio CD clicks still remain!!! I think it's a deliberate SimpleBurner rootkit because: 1). of the infamous audio CD rootkit fiasco 2). Sony Soundforge plugins, when used in Wavelab, make a similar click 3). the clicks are only on one of my optical drives 4). hard drive activity when audio-CD plays (only on one CD drive) 5). the clicks started right after SimpleBurner installed 6). the "bug" affects audio-CD play/rip only! Nothing else! Am I right?... How do I fix it?...

Hi Guitarfxr, thanks for your advice. Actually, I don't run Norton or MacAfee. They tie up system resources & do horrible things when recording audio. But I do run Spybot - it hasn't detected anything unusual. Could it be some sort of rootkit? I've run a couple of anti-rootkit programs - Rootkit Reveal & Panda AntiRootkit. They found nothing. Can AVG Free detect rootkits? My PC is otherwise fine. It's interesting this bug, rootkit or whatever it is, is specifically targetting audio CD playback/ripping. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Many thanks. I checked the CD-R drive's Properties page - it all appears normal, and nothing seems to have changed there. Interestingly, playing an audio CD currently causes two things: 1). a moderate amount of CPU activity, roughly 50% usage; 2). a frantic amount of hard drive activity. I guess that could mean some process (SimpleBurner?... or some coincidental trojan?) is dumping audio CD data onto the hard-drive while it's playing. Hence the glitches. The moment I press "stop" in Media Player, the last active/open file at that point is called "catdb" and is located here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\CatRoot2\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE} It's about 4Mb in size. Anyone recognise this file, or process?

Thanks, Kino170878, for your reply. But - will this then stop audio-CDs glitching in Wavelab, Media Player, and basically every non-Sony program? The glitches are at random intervals, sound like damaged vinyl, and look like this:

Hi, I recently installed SimpleBurner, drivers, Daemon Tools, M3U2SB and Nero Image Drive for my pet MZ-N910. Maybe coincidentally ("it was working a minute ago!"), my CD-R drive then suddenly developed audio playback faults - random glitches, clicks and bursts of noise/static. The drive's audio glitches occur during CD audio playback through Media Player. They can also be seen as ugly deformations in the waveform when ripping to .wav using Wavelab 4.0. But its neighbouring DVD-ROM still plays/rips CDs perfectly!... I've uninstalled everything, but the CD-R audio glitches remain. Is this some bizarre anti-piracy measure (I'm a musician trying to put my old songs onto MD, bug-free, and also to the web)? Should I have installed SonicStage first (not my favourite program)?.... Can someone suggest a solution, or refer me to a previous posting? many thanks!