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Some of the Windows-based recording software advised turning off Auto-Insert Notification.

Having this on can interfere with closing sessions or even just inserting discs into the drive. Most of the recent software will disable it automatically, but some of the older products require you to disable it manually.

You can do so under Win95/Win98 by:

  1. opening the "System" icon in the Control Panel,
  2. selecting "Device Manager".

For each item under CD-ROM:

  1. select the device,
  2. click on the "Settings" tab,
    and make sure the "Auto Insert Notification" checkbox is unchecked.

If you're using WinNT, you can turn it off with the "TweakUI" program available in PowerToys (available from the Microsoft web site), or by modifying a registry key with Regedit32 (0=disabled, 1=enabled):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ Cdrom \ Autorun

If your software automatically turns AIN off, and you can't figure out how to turn it back on, the TweakUI program may be able to help.

  1. Check the "Paranoia" settings
    (if installing the Power Toys screws up your icons, select "Rebuild Icons" from the "Repair" menu.)
  2. If you turn it off and on again, you may have to reboot in some configurations before it will work again.

Because it only affects CDs with actual data being written to them, a test write won't end in failure. With disc-at-once recording, the process will abort very near the start of recording, probably leaving an empty but useless disc. With track-at-once recording, it will fail at the end, and you may still be able to finalize the disc. Audio CDs will most likely work fine even if interrupted at the end of the write process.

Important: If you are using DirectCD for Windows, you must have AIN turned on.