Last-modified: 2000/09/21
Version: 2.22
This is general information about recommended ways to do specific tasks.
Several publishers have CD-to-CD copiers. Two low-cost versions for the PC are Adaptec EZ-SCSI, which comes with a simple CD copier called "CD Copier", and Jeff Arnold's freeware CD2CD (http://www.goldenhawk.com/). Mac users can get a product called CD-Copy from Astarte (http://www.astarte.de/).
The easiest and most reliable method to make copies of single-track data CDs is also the least expensive: CD2CD runs under DOS and works very well with a wide variety of hardware.
Software such as Arnold's and Adaptec's will allow you to make a CD image on a hard drive that can then be written to multiple CDs.
The fancier packages will usually provide a way to do this as well, but the software tends to be more complicated and harder to use. Multi- session and other complicated formats require more sophisticated software, such as Jeff Arnold's SNAPSHOT or CDRWIN.
It's important to remember that, when copying directly from one CD to another, the source MUST be faster than the target, and must be error-free. If the source pauses or spins down to read a marginal area of the disc, the target may outrun the source, and the CD-R will only be useful as a frisbee. Most programs have a "test write" feature that put the CD-R device into a mode where it goes through all the motions but doesn't actually write anything; it's a good idea to do this right before copying.
CDs don't have circular tracks. They're laid out on a spiral, with multiple sessions composed of multiple tracks composed of sectors, and the data in the sectors is interleaved and spread over a large area. The sector format is standard, but there's more than one standard.
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, _Computer Networks_, 2nd ed, p.254
The ability to read certain portions of a CD depends on the CD firmware. Some CD players aren't capable of understanding multi-session discs or of reading audio tracks as digital data. Jitter, described in section (2-15), is also a problem for most drives.
Start with the CD-DA FAQ: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~psyche/cdda/. Take a look at http://come.to/cdspeed to see if your CD-ROM drive is up to the task. EAC, from http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/, is often recommended for extracting ("ripping") audio tracks.
To copy from CD to CD, the source drive needs to support digital audio extraction, which is rare among older drives but very common in current models. Ideally, the copy program will use disc-at-once recording to produce a duplicate that mimics the original as closely as possible (CDRWIN works well; see section (6-1-7)).
Some programs will only copy the CD to the hard drive and from there to CD-R, some will allow CD-to-CD directly but only if the source is a SCSI CD-ROM, and some will work with IDE or SCSI. As with copying CD-ROMs, you must be able to read data off of the source drive faster than your recorder is writing. If you can only extract audio at 1x, you're not going to be able to do a CD-to-CD copy reliably.
If you're just interested in extracting digital audio, you don't even need a CD-R unit, just a CD-ROM drive that supports Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) and some software. The CD-DA sites noted at the top of this section list drives that support DAE, have software to evaluate your existing drive, and have links to several different DAE applications.
Different drives can extract digital audio at different speeds. For example, the Plextor 6Plex can extract audio at 6x, while the NEC 6Xi can only extract at 1x. The Plextor UltraPlex has been clocked at over 20x.
Some CD-ROM and CD-R drives have trouble extracting digital audio at high speed, so if you're getting lots of clicks and pops when extracting you should try doing it at a slower speed. You may also run into trouble if you try to extract faster than your hard drive can write. One user found that he was able to eliminate clicks and pops by defragmenting his hard drive. Another found that the Win95 "vcache" fix (section (4-1-2)) solved his problems.
It should be pointed out that, while digitally extracted audio is an exact copy of the data on the CD, it's an exact copy as your CD player perceives it. Different drives or different runs with the same drive can extract slightly different data from the same disc. The differences are usually inaudible, however. Some newer drives will report the number of uncorrectable errors encountered, so you can get a sense for how accurate the extraction really is.
The quality of the audio on the duplicate CD-R, given a high-quality extraction, depends mostly on how well your CD player gets along with the brand of media you're using. See the next section for some comments about avoiding clicks and pops.
Some drives have trouble starting at the exact start of audio tracks. The extraction starts a few blocks forward of where it should, and ends a few blocks later, so the track may not sound quite right and the extraction program will report errors at the end of the last track. See section (4-19).
The Lite-On LTN483S 48x CD-ROM drive has a fairly unique bit of brain damage: it doesn't extract the last two seconds of a track correctly. This is only apparent on audio CDs with a "cold stop", where the music plays right up to the very end of the track. If the track has two seconds of silence at the end, there are no apparent problems.
One minor note: the data on audio CDs is stored in "Motorola" big-endian format, with the high byte of each 16-bit word first. AIFF files also use this format, but WAV files use "Intel" little-endian format. Make sure your software deals with the endian-flipping correctly. Byte-swapped CD audio sounds like "static".
If you're interested in removing noise from audio captured from an analog source, such as a record player or analog cassette tape, skip to section (3-12). This section is about unexpected noise in audio from digital sources, such as tracks extracted from a CD.
The single most important rule of noise removal is to figure out where the noise came from. Play the .WAV files off of your hard drive (if you're doing direct CD-to-CD copies, extract a track and listen to it). If you hear noise in the .WAV on your hard drive, the digital audio extraction isn't working very well. You either need to extract more slowly, extract from a different device, find a program that works better, or maybe just clean the dust and grime off the source CD. For more information, including a URL for the CD-DA FAQ, see section (3-2).
If the problem sounds like repeated or skipped samples, rather than clicks or hissing, the problem is probably jitter during extraction. See section (2-15) for an overview.
A nifty trick for comparing two .WAV files is to use the "Mix Paste" feature in Cool Edit. Extract a track twice, then use Mix Paste to copy an inverted version of one file on top of the other. The two sound files will cancel each other out wherever they are identical, and have little spikes where they are different. This can be useful for seeing if the problems are only on one channel or are happening at regular intervals. You need to make sure though that both files start at the same place though. If your CD-ROM drive doesn't always extract from the start of the block, you will need to adjust the files so they line up.
Useful things to do with this include comparing two extractions from the same drive, extractions from different drives, or extractions from the CD-R you just wrote to the original .WAV file you used to write it.
If you just want to see if the files are the same, use the DOS File Compare command, with the "binary" switch set: FC /B FILE1.WAV FILE2.WAV.
Some CD-ROM drives may put a click a few seconds into the first track being extracted. This appears to be related to the drive spinning up. Try starting the extraction, cancelling, and then immediately restarting.
The rest of this section only applies if the extracted audio sounds fine on disk, but has problems when played back from the CD-R.
If you're using track-at-once recording, you may get a short click or
silent "hiccup" at the start of each track. Hiccups are unavoidable, but
you should be able to get rid of the click by using different software.
If you're using disc-at-once recording, and are still getting a short click at the *start* of every track, then your recording software is probably writing the sound file with the headers still on it. You should either use a smarter program, or remove the header manually (see the URL for "WAVECLIP", below).
If you are getting clicks in the middle of a track, they are either being added when pulling the data off the disc or when writing it. If the .WAV (AIFF on the Mac) file plays without clicks, then your CD recorder may be failing somehow during the write process. Some people who got "static" in audio recorded on an HP 4020i found that reducing the DMA transfer rate to 2MB/sec helped.
One user was told by Yamaha tech support that crackling (similar to a dirty vinyl LP) was a symptom of laser misalignment. If you've been writing audio CDs for quite a while, but lately you've been getting "crackly" results from tried-and-true media, this might be the culprit. Since it requires returning the unit for repair, you should exhaust all other possibilities first.
If you are getting clicks at the end of a track, it's possible that the software used to create the .WAV file put some information at the very end, which is legal but not handled correctly by some CD-R software. See section (3-12) for tips on using CoolEdit to remove the data. If you are finding that tracks extracted from CDs don't have clicks but tracks that you have recorded or edited do, chances are the data size isn't a multiple of 2352 bytes, and the last block is being filled with junk. This is common on live recordings or when large tracks are cut into smaller ones. Jeff Arnold's DAO will fill out the last block with zeros (digital silence) if there is space left over, but most of the other programs will write garbage that is audible as a short (less than 1/75th second) click. The fix is to split the track on 2352-byte block boundaries.
A program called "WAVECLIP" will remove .WAV headers and footers, and will either pad out the last block or remove silence from the end of a WAV file to make it an exact multiple of 2352 bytes. The program is available from http://www.ptialaska.net/~syntec/waveclip.zip. Another choice is "StripWave", from http://www.lightlink.com/tjweber/.
If you must use track-at-once, make sure you're writing it all in one
session. PC-based CD players may be able to see tracks in later sessions,
but the CD player in your stereo system can't.
A distantly related problem can arise if you use "shuffle play" to play random tracks from a CD-R. If the audio of track N begins immediately, some CD players will slide from the end of track N-1 into the start of track N, playing a short burst of track N before seeking elsewhere. This can be avoided by putting a gap at the start of such tracks (e.g. with "INDEX 01 xx:yy:zz" in a DAO cue sheet).
For PCs, Jeff Arnold has a utility called CDRWIN that can do this. See section (6-1-7). For Macs, take a look at Astarte's CD-Copy ( section (6-2-8)).
Note that the software does NOT defeat the copy protection. I'm told that the "copy protection" on Playstation discs is in fact a region code -- America, Europe, Japan -- encoded near the start of the disc. The "MOD chip", a device attached to the Playstation that defeats one aspect of the copy protection, emulates the country code reading process. It sends all three region codes back, enabling the game console to play original discs from other regions as well as copied discs. Some people say the code is written in a block with damaged ECC, some say it's in the barcode on the hub, others have insisted that it's in the ATIP region of the lead-in. Whatever the case, it doesn't get copied by a CD recorder, and claims of hacked recorder firmware that can create MOD-chip-free duplicates are false.
Instructions for copying discs and vendors who sell MOD chips can be found by searching the net. If you don't have a PC, or if your drive doesn't support disc-at-once recording, you will need to look for disc copying instructions on the net.
Sega Dreamcast discs use a proprietary format, called GD-ROM, which can hold 1GB of data. This makes it impossible to make an exact copy, though it is possible in many cases to copy "enough" stuff to make them work. Persistent rumors claiming that CeQuadrat's PacketCD can copy the discs are false. GD-R (Gigabyte Disc Recordable) media has two regions, a "single-density" area near the hub and a "high-density" area farther out. A visual inspection of GD-R media suggests that the single-density area starts at about 22mm from the disc's center (same as a CD-R) and goes to 29mm. From 29mm to 31mm is a "no-mans" land that isn't recordable, and the high-density area goes from 31mm to 58mm. An image of one is available on http://www.fadden.com/cdrpics/.
Incidentally, posting requests or advertisements for pirated software on one of the non-warez Usenet groups is generally regarded as a mark of extreme stupidity. Whatever your opinion of software piracy, it is against the law in much of the world.
There are several different ways, most of which only work with some operating systems. The next few sections discuss the various methods.
See http://www.adaptec.com/tools/compatibility/cdrecfilename.html for a detailed description with some examples.
Getting mixed-case filenames onto a disc is a similar problem. Burning an ISO-9660 disc with lower-case filenames isn't recommended, because some systems aren't able to access the files even though they appear in directory listings.
"mkhybrid" and recent versions of "mkisofs" (1.12b1 or later), described in sections (6-1-32) and (6-1-10), respectively, are able to create CDs that have both Joliet and Rock Ridge extensions. "mkhybrid" can create discs with Joliet, Rock Ridge, and Mac HFS on the same disc, sharing the same file data.
Level 1 ISO-9660 defines names to be the familiar 8+3 convention that MS-DOS users have suffered through for many years: eight characters for the name, a period ("full stop" for those of you in the U.K.), followed by three characters for the file type, all in upper case. The only allowed characters are A-Z, 0-9, '.', and '_'. There's also a file version number, separated from the name by a semicolon, but it's usually ignored.
Files must occupy a contiguous range of sectors. This allows a file to be specified with a start block and a count. (Most disk-based filesystems require index blocks that list all the blocks used by a file.) The maximum directory depth is 8.
Level 2 ISO-9660 allows far more flexibility in filenames, but isn't usable on some systems, notably MS-DOS.
Level 3 ISO-9660 allows non-contiguous files, useful if the file was written in multiple packets with packet-writing software. Also unavailable under MS-DOS. For the Mac, you can add support by installing Joliet Volume Access (http://www.tempel.org/joliet/).
Some of the CD creation programs will let you select how closely you want the CD to conform to the ISO-9660 standard. For example, Easy-CD Pro 95 can restrict filenames to be ISO-9660 compliant, or allow the full set of valid MS-DOS filenames. (Most systems can handle MS-DOS filenames.)
Incidentally, the ISO-9660 spec requires that all files be displayed in alphabetical order, with directories first, no matter how they are recorded on the CD-ROM. You can't arrange files on the disc, because the ISO-9660 reader (e.g. MSCDEX) sorts them before displaying them.
The Rock Ridge extensions to ISO-9660 define a way for UNIX-isms like long mixed-case filenames and symbolic links to be supported.
Because it's still an ISO-9660 filesystem, the files can still be read by machines that don't support Rock Ridge; they just won't see the long forms of the names.
Rock Ridge is supported by UNIX systems. DOS, Windows, and the Mac don't currently support it.
Copies of the Rock Ridge standard and System Use Sharing Protocol (SUSP) can be found at ftp://ftp.ymi.com/pub/rockridge/. Pay a visit to http://makecd.core.de/Rock_Ridge_Amiga_Specific for a description of Amiga-specific extensions.
HFS is the Hierarchical File System, used by the Macintosh. This is used in place of the ISO-9660 filesystem, making the disc unusable on systems that don't support HFS.
At present, the systems that can read HFS CD-ROMS are Macs, Amigas (with AmiCDROM, available from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/aminet/disk/cdrom/), PCs running Linux or OS/2 (with appropriate patches), the Apple IIgs, and SGI machines running Irix (they appear as AppleDouble format).
Some authoring packages for the Mac and Windows allow the creation of "hybrid" CDs that have both an ISO-9660 filesystem and an HFS filesystem.
Apple has defined some ISO-9660 extensions that allow Macintosh files to exist with file and creator types on ISO-9660 CD-ROMs. A description of the extensions is available as tech note FL 36 from: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/fl/fl_36.html
Microsoft, being Microsoft, created their own standard called "Joliet". This is currently supported by Win95 and WinNT. It's useful when doing backups from Win95 onto a CD-R, because the disc is still readable as ISO-9660 but shows the long filenames under Win95. The limit on Joliet filenames is 64 characters.
The spec can be found at http://www-plateau.cs.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/jolspec.html.
Recent versions of Linux (kernel >= 2.0.34 and 2.1.60) have Joliet support. Older versions can be patched; for details, see http://www-plateau.cs.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/joliet.html.
To patch Joliet support into OS/2, visit: http://service.software.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html/miscellb/os_2warp/updatedc/index.htm
For the Macintosh, use Joliet Volume Access (http://www.tempel.org/joliet/).
Some old Creative CD-ROM drivers have trouble with CD-ROMs that have Joliet filenames. You may need an updated copy of sbided95.exe, available from http://www.ctlsg.creaf.com/wwwnew/tech/ftp/ftp-cd.html.
Adaptec's Easy-CD Pro software allows creation of discs in "Romeo" format. Filenames may be up to 128 characters long. This never really caught on.
These are (relatively) new standards intended to replace ISO-9660. The UDF filesystem specification is based on ISO/IEC 13346 (which is closely related to ECMA-167). For more information about these standards, see the links in section (6-4).
Short answer: you don't, unless you have a CD-i add-on board. Even if you have a CD reader compatible with the CD-i (Green Book) standard, there are still a number of obstacles in your way. The filesystem used isn't ISO-9660, and CD-i players are based around a 680x0 CPU and have special hardware for video and audio.
Longer answer: it depends on what kind of disc it is, and what you mean by "use".
PhotoCD and VideoCD discs are CD-ROM/XA "Bridge Format" discs that play on CD-i players as well as dedicated players and computers. These use the ISO-9660 file system, and can be read with commonly available PhotoCD software and MPEG-1 players.
DigitalVideo discs from Philips manufactured before June, 1994 are in CD-i format, not VideoCD format. If your CD-ROM drive supports raw 2352-byte sector reads, it's possible to pull tracks off of a Green Book format disc, and extract audio or MPEG video data. VCD PowerPlayer from CyberLink (http://www.cyberlink.com.tw/) can play CD-i movies directly off of a Green Book disc.
In-depth information is available from http://www.kennisonline.com/cd-i/.
Typical Red Book audio CDs don't have this information. Software audio CD players like those provided by Adaptec or Microsoft require you to type in the information, which is then stored in a database on your hard drive. The discs are identified by computing a signature based on track offsets and other fields. http://www.cddb.com/ acts as an Internet database of CD info.
Some newer formats, like CD Extra, allow or even require such information to be included on the CD. See Sony's pages at http://www.cdextra.com/.
Some recent CD players are advertised as "CD-Text Ready". These use the CD-Text data embedded in the P-W subcode channels to display disc and track title data. See section (3-28) for more about CD-Text.
CD-R's have a pre-formed spiral track, and the sector addresses are hard-coded into CD-R media, so there's no flexibility. Every disc holds a predetermined amount of data.
Most discs hold slightly more than 74 minutes. How much more depends on the brand of media, batch of media, and perhaps even on the recorder used (see section (7-6) for more details on how much a CD-R can hold). In some situations you can exceed the stated capacity of the disc; see section (3-8-3) below.
Since CDs are written in a spiral, the amount of data you can get on a disc is affected by how tightly spaced the "groove" is. A standard Red Book audio CD or Yellow Book CD-ROM is designed to allow at most 74 minutes of data. By using a tighter track pitch on the spiral "groove" on the glass master, manufacturers can get more data onto the disc. In theory this could make it harder for some CD readers to use the discs.
There *are* 80-minute CD-R blanks, but they're more expensive, and may not work on all systems. Some sources say that the longest possible CD-R is 79 minutes, 59 seconds, 74 blocks long, because of the way that the last possible start time of the lead-out is encoded, but some recorders may allow even larger values. See the next sub-section for more about 80-minute media.
The easiest way to get more data onto a disc is not to try. For audio CDs, you can leave off one or two tracks that you're not overly fond of. For data CDs you may be able to drop some images or sample data. The most common problem people encounter with data CDs is trying to copy them as a collection of files rather than doing a bulk copy of the entire disc. See also section (3-24).
One user suggested using the "speed up" function of SoundForge or CoolEdit to increase the speed of extracted WAV files by 3%. This supposedly gives better results than resampling, and allows writing 77 minutes.
If you have a mono recording, you could double the length of a CD by recording half the sound on the left track and half on the right. The sound would be recorded as two monaural files, and then merged into a single stereo file with a sound editor like Cool Edit. (With Cool Edit 96: load first mono file. Use "Convert Sample Type" to convert to Stereo. Select the right track, and Delete Selection. Use Mix Paste to load the right track from the second file, or just fire up a second copy of Cool Edit with the other track, and use Copy and Paste commands.) The person playing the CD back will need to use a "balance" knob to select the left or right track. One issue with this method is that the track markers apply to both tracks, so providing random access to specific sections can be tricky.
If you're trying to copy a CD-ROM or VideoCD and running out of room, you may have a different problem. See sections (3-24) and (4-25).
Incidentally, don't get confused when you discover you have 700MB of audio extracted from a CD that only holds 650MB. Audio sectors use 2352 bytes per sector, while standard CD-ROM data uses 2048 (the rest is for error correction). You can put roughly 747MB of audio onto a disc that only holds 650MB of data.
In general, they work just fine. Reports from people who have used 80-minute CD-Rs indicate that compatibility with different CD-ROM drives is very good. However, bear in mind the following statement, which was sent by e-mail from a TDK representative:
"The CD-R80 is a special product developed by TDK to meet the application needs of software developers and music studios. To achieve its 80 minute recording time, track pitch and scanning velocity specification tolerances had to be minimized, reducing the margin of error between drive and media. This means limited compatibility between some CD-Recorders and CD-ROM Readers. If you intend to use this recording length, please check with your hardware manufacturer. Use of the CD-R80 is at one's own risk. No guarantees of performance are made by TDK."The TDK discs are now "official"; see http://www.tdk.com/n_80mincd.html.
Whether it's better to use 80-minute discs or "overburning" (described in the next section) is a worthy subject for debate. Both can cause problems on different CD-ROM drives, and not all recorders are capable of doing one or the other.
An 80-minute disc has roughly 360,000 sectors instead of the usual 333,000. This increases the CD-ROM capacity from 650MB to 703MB.
If you're making backups of your hard drive or writing valuable data, don't use either. Stick to 74-minute blanks, and only record as much as you're supposed to. CD-R media is too inexpensive these days to justify pushing the limits for a slight increase in storage.
Here's a few personal notes on my experiments with TDK 80-minute "green"
blanks, back in late 1997. Similar discs are now commonly available from
several Internet vendors, for a small markup over 74-minute media. Back
then this wasn't the case, but I was able to purchase a small quantity
(three discs) from Microboards at http://www.microboards.com/.
The discs were part number SCWA-ETC80A-X, priced at US$40.00 per disc in October 1997. That was about 20x the cost for an extra 8% storage. The discs were unbranded. The only difference I could see between these and other TDK green discs is that on the hub it says "CD-Recordable 6129B-80". Easy CD Creator Deluxe v3 showed 359,624 blocks (702.8MB in MODE-1) on the TDK 80-minute blanks, versus 333,010 blocks (650.8MB) available on my Mitsui gold 74-minute blanks.
The first challenge was finding software that would work correctly with the discs. Neither Easy-CD Pro 95 v1.2 nor Easy CD Creator Deluxe v3.0 would allow me to do a test recording with more than 650MB of files. I ended up using mkisofs to create an image file with 341,163 blocks (666.3MB) of data, composed of two large .AVI files, and three smaller pieces of one of the other .AVI files. (With Easy CD Creator Deluxe v3.5 and later, you can choose to ignore a warning about the data size.)
Using a Yamaha CDR-102 with v1.0 firmware, the first thing I tried was to burn the image file to a 74-minute blank. Easy-CD immediately rejected the disc, saying there wasn't enough space. I then put the 80-minute blank in and did a test run. Easy-CD Pro 95 had no problems burning the ISO-9660 image file, until the screen saver activated and McAfee anti-virus "screen scan" kicked in. Good thing it was a test burn; I got a buffer underrun. I killed the screen saver and virus checker and ran again, had a successful test run, and followed it with a successful burn.
To verify the data, I used Easy-CD Pro 95's "compare track" feature. This failed, complaining that one track was shorter than the other. My guess is that the compare feature has some sort of track length limitation. My next attempt was to use the Linux "sum" command to make sure that the disc was readable in my Plextor 8Plex. This worked fine, and the output of "sum" matched what I got on the 4x CD-ROM drive in the Sun workstation at work. I also tried the disc in a Mac 7500 and a Dell Pentium, and had no problems with either.
The next step was an 80-minute audio CD, and that's where things fell apart. Easy-CD Pro 95 v1.2 didn't work at all (!), Easy CD Creator Deluxe v3.0 again refused to allow me to create a long audio CD, and with Jeff Arnold's software (both the DOS version and CDRWIN) the test write failed after a minute or so (after the lead-in had completed?). Strangely, removing the last two tracks from the cue sheet, which reduced it to 72 minutes, allowed the test write to succeed on both 74-minute and 80-minute blanks. It appears that the Yamaha CDR-102 drive is unwilling to write that much audio data.
Small quantities of 90-minute and 99-minute blanks are starting to appear. It looks like most recorders stop well before the 99-minute mark, and so far there's few indications on CD reader compatibility.
CD time stamps are two digits (binary coded decimal, in case you were wondering), so exceeding 99 minutes isn't possible. You could, in theory, declare there to be 99 seconds in a minute and 99 sectors per second, but that would break just about everything that tried to read one. The limits of the specifications are being pushed at 80 minutes and even harder at 90, so don't expect much more out of CD-R.
The capacity of a CD-R is calculated to allow enough space to hold at least 74 minutes of Red Book audio data and 90 seconds of digital silence. The silent area is called the "lead-out", and is included so that a CD player will realize that it has reached the end of the disc, especially when fast-forwarding.
When a recording program tells you the exact capacity of the disc, it's not including the area reserved for the lead-out. There's nothing magic about this reserved area though. With the right kind of setup -- and a willingness to accept write failures as a matter of course -- you can put data into the reserved area, and possibly into a few blocks past the end of it. This is often referred to as "overburning" a disc.
How much more you can fit depends almost entirely on the media. Some brands will hold as much as 78 minutes, but it varies from batch to batch. You can use Feurio! (section (6-1-42)) to compute the maximum size of a specific disc without actually writing anything on it.
You also need the right recorder and the right software. The Teac CD-R55S, Plextor PX-R412C, Yamaha 4xx/4xxx, and Memorex/Dysan CRW-1622 units have been used to write "extra long" audio discs successfully. The Philips 36xx, HP 71xx, and Ricoh 62xx units don't seem to be willing to do so. In some cases, getting the firmware revision may be important. A recorder that isn't able to do this sort of writing will usually reject the cue sheet before writing begins.
To write such a disc, you need to use a program that won't refuse to exceed the disc capacity. Easy CD Creator, in an attempt to prevent you from making mistakes, will refuse to allow you to write more than you should be able to. CDRWIN will warn you that the write may fail, but will allow you to continue anyway. Nero has a preference (under Expert Features) called "enable oversize disc" that allows the longer write.
One approach to determining the maximum disc length is to gather a large collection of audio tracks, and start writing. Eventually the recorder will attempt to write past the end of the disc, and the write process will fail. Now play the disc, preferrably in a player that shows the total elapsed time for the entire disc. When the music cuts off, make a note of the time. That's the absolute capacity of the disc.
Most (all?) CD players will display the total disc time when you first put the disc in. This value represents how much you tried to write, not how much was actually written. If you want to impress your friends, try to write 88 minutes of music. You won't get anywhere near that far, but the CD player will show it.
It should be possible to write a CD-ROM in the same manner as an audio CD, but the space would have to be calculated so that the write failure occurred when the lead-out was being written. Otherwise, some of the files that appeared to be on the disc wouldn't actually exist.
Recording in DAO mode may be helpful to ensure that the lead-in gets written. Without a table of contents, the disc is useless. It's very likely however that you will be able to finalize the disc even after the write fails.
Depending on the disc and your player, you may have trouble seeking out to tracks near the end of the disc. Also, your CD player may behave strangely when it walks off the end of the disc: one user said he had to open and close the player afterward to convince it that a disc was still loaded.
The disc surface past the end of the area reserved for the leadout may be unreliable. Attempting to use more than 90 seconds (about 15MB of MODE-1 data) beyond the rated capacity of a disc could be asking for trouble.
It's possible to perform similar tricks on 80-minute media. Experiments with TDK 80-minute discs resulted in a recorded length of 82:09. MMC recorders don't seem to like having the lead-out position any later than 88:29:74, but that shouldn't get in the way.
Further commentary and instructions can be found at http://www.cdmediaworld.com/ under "OverSize / OverBurn CD-Rs", including a list of recorders that are known to work and step-by-step instructions for using popular software.
The first thing you have to do is get them onto your computer. There are three basic approaches: use a scanner to convert printed photographs, use a video digitizer to pull images off of a video tape, or use a digital camera to take pictures that can be transferred directly.
There are a great many different scanners, with different resolutions and capabilities. http://www.zdnet.com/products/scanneruser/index.html is a fair place to start.
Video digitizers are mentioned in section (3-16). If you're scanning off of VHS video tape, you are going to get disappointing results.
Digital cameras will generally give you the best results. A mid-range digital camera will give you pictures that look as good (when printed on a photo-quality printer, which are inexpensive now) as a 35mm point-and-shoot film camera. A few links:
Once you have the photograph on your hard drive, you may want to touch it up a bit. You can use software to correct for over- and under-exposed snapshots, remove "red eye", and crop off bits that weren't supposed to be in the frame. Cameras and scanners should come with image manipulation software that will help you manipulate and manage the images. Adobe's PhotoShop (http://www.adobe.com/) is the standard high-end solution, and their PhotoDeluxe Home Edition may appeal to a less demanding crowd.
Once you've got the images in a reasonable state, save them in a widely accepted format such as JPEG or TIFF, and write them to a CD-ROM like you would any other files. You may need to use an "Export" function rather than "Save As...", because consumer photo software authors tend to use proprietary image formats as the default.
If you want to create a PhotoCD that can be played in a PhotoCD player, continue on to the next section. If you're interested in arranging the pictures into an album, see (3-9-2).
First off, you need to be aware that certain aspects of PhotoCD creation are proprietary to Kodak. Programs like Adaptec's Easy CD Creator will allow you to create CD-ROMs with PhotoCD image files, and you will be able to view the images with Mac or PC programs that understand the PhotoCD file format, but you won't be able to look at the disc with a PhotoCD player.
http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/corp/pressReleases/pr19950328-10.shtml has the glossy brochure information, with some Kodak contact information. The Build-It and Arrange-It software, which allow you to create "real" PhotoCDs, costs about US$450. Kodak apparently pulled the software from the market in December 1997, so it may be difficult to find.
http://www.shiresoft.com/ gives you step-by-step instructions and software for creating "real" PhotoCD discs with Kodak's software. The Build-It program will only write to Kodak CD recorders, but a translator available from this web site will allow it to work with GEAR or CDRWIN. Follow the Kodak links on that page.
There are some utilities that will convert images into PCD format, but they only support the uncompressed base resolutions. The higher resolutions are compressed with an algorithm proprietary to Kodak.
There are programs available that will do this for you, or you can take a "do it yourself" approach. Some examples:
Adaptec "Photo Relay" (part of Easy CD Creator Deluxe Edition - see section (6-1-26)). According to their web page, it "lets you organize digitized photos and videos, then create Slide Shows, Web Albums and Video Postcards that can be stored to CD and shared with others - no proprietary viewer is required by the recipient!".
Cerious "Thumb's Plus" (http://www.cerious.com/). Helps you organize images and create slide shows. Free evaluation version.
Firehand "Lightning" (http://www.firehand.com/lightning/). Photo albums, slide shows, screen savers. Free evaluation version.
Tlonstruct "CDView Pro" (http://tlonstruct.com/). Fancy picture viewer. Free shareware download.
G&A Imaging "PhotoRecall" (http://www.ga-imaging.com/). Commercial program with lots of features.
InMedia "Slides & Sounds" (http://www.inmediapresents.com/slideshows.html). Create fancy presentations. Demo available.
Extensis "Portfolio" (http://www.extensis.com/portfolio/). Heavy-duty software for "media asset management". Supports every file format you've ever heard of, and has support for hybrid CD recording.
The do-it-yourself approach. Make an HTML page with pictures, using a program like Microsoft FrontPage to create thumbnails (the auto-thumbnail feature is *very* handy), so that when you click on the thumbnail image you get the full-sized image. Put the HTML page and all of the graphics onto a CD-ROM, and view the pictures with a web browser. For bonus points you can use "shellout" with autorun.inf (section (3-21)) to have Windows automatically launch the default web browser when the disc is inserted, and "mkhybrid" to create a disc with long filenames and correct file types for Rock Ridge, Joliet, and MacOS.
[ Moved to section (3-35). ]
As always, it depends.
MS-DOS lets you see the first data session. Usually. Win95 lets you see the last data session. Usally. Adaptec's Session Selector and Ahead's MultiMounter will let you choose which session you see.
Some CD creation software (e.g. Adaptec Easy-CD Writer) writes a complete table of contents in each session, some of which refers back to the files from the previous session, allowing a form of incremental backup. (This will work for ISO-9660 discs, but won't work for HFS. However, this is less painful than it seems because a properly-configured Macintosh will let you mount all the sessions as individual volumes.)
Adaptec's Easy-CD Pro will allow you to combine the contents of several previous sessions by creating a new session (use RCD's Load Contents option to read the file/directory info from more than one session, then write and close a new session with that directory structure).
Some of it depends on the SCSI or CD-ROM driver you have installed. It's unwise to expect somebody else's system to treat multisession discs the same way yours does.
The tricky part in doing this -- unless you have a stand-alone audio CD recorder -- is getting the audio transferred to your computer and modifying it to suit your tastes. The act of writing a sound file onto a CD is fairly trivial with most recorders and software. If you're considering the purchase of a computer-connected recorder for transferring tapes or LPs to CD, you should worry less about the recorder and more about the quality of the digitized audio. Few, if any, people will insist that recorder A produces better quality audio CD-Rs than recorder B, but everybody has an opinion about sound cards.
Some tutorials are recommended:
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~abcomp/lp-cdr.htmAlso read through http://www.octave.com/library/audiocd.html. These articles go into a lot more detail than this section does.
http://www.ganymede.hemscott.net/tutorial.htm
http://www.octave.com/library/outsidesource.html
If you have questions or need a recommendation on a sound card, you might want to try:
news:rec.audio.techSome highly technical benchmark evaluations of cards are available at http://www.rockpark.com/soundcards/ and http://www.pcavtech.com/.
news:comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.tech
To record on your PC, connect the output of the receiver/amplifier to the
"line in" on your sound card. If you want to go directly from a record
player, you need to run it through a pre-amp (which both pre-amplifies the
signal and equalizes it to RIAA standards). Anything labeled "preamp out"
or "tape out" can be connected directly.
You can use the A/D (analog-to-digital) converter built into a sound card like a SoundBlaster 16, but the sound quality will not be very good. The sound cards from Turtle Beach (Tropez, Tahiti) and CrystaLake are a step up, and a Digital Audio Labs CardD+ is about as good as it gets for internal A/D cards. If you're really serious, you should get an external A/D converter like the Symetrix 620 or the Lucid AD9624 and feed the digital output from that into the computer. Another way of accomplishing the same thing is to record to an audio DAT deck and then use the digital output on the DAT recorder; see section (3-13) for details. (Looks like the Lucid device has superseded the Symetrix one -- it's the same company. Relevant URLs are http://www.symetrixaudio.com/faq620.htm and http://www.lucidtechnology.com/welcome.htm.)
A problem with some sound cards (really cheap Opti and ESS cards have been named) is that the crystal that controls the recording sample rate is off. If the card doesn't do the sampling at the correct rate, the recorded audio may end up slightly slower or faster than the original. This will become apparent when the sound is played back off of a CD or through a better sound card.
When recording, try to get as much signal as possible. Normalization will bring the signal level up, but can't replace parts of the signal that were lost. Sound editing utilities, such as GoldWave or Cool Edit, can be used to equalize, normalize, and even perform noise reduction on your recordings.
Adaptec's Easy CD Creator includes an application called "Spin Doctor" that performs most of the tasks needed to transfer LPs to CD. Depending on your needs, it may provide a simple solution for all your needs.
There are a variety of programs that can automatically remove pops, clicks, and hissing from digitized audio. Few automated tools can do as good a job cleaning up pops and other noise as an experienced person, however. If you want to perform the transfer by hand, the following method has been suggested for PC users:
Software that may come in handy:
Don't forget that CD audio is 16-bit PCM stereo samples at 44.1KHz, and will chew up disk space at roughly 176K per second. Playing back large sound files is difficult with simple-minded applications like the standard Win95 WAV player, because they try to load the entire file into memory all at once. Cool Edit 96 is able to play files back as it reads them, and works very well even over a network. (Section (4-20) has some other suggestions on this same topic.)
See section (3-3) for some tips on avoiding clicks when committing the audio to CD.
If, for some reason, you'd like to record "live" to the CD-R instead of recording to the hard drive first, Adaptec's Spin Doctor (part of Easy CD Creator) can do that.
You can find odd bits of hardware that will play or enhance playback of older recording formats (78's, LP's, 16" Radio Transcriptions) at Nauck's Vintage Records (http://www.78rpm.com/).
For those of you wondering what the deal with pre-amplification is, this little tidbit is courtesy Mike Richter:
"Preemphasis has been used since the earliest days of commercial recording. In general, the high-frequency content of the music (or whatever) being recorded is low and the noise is high. Therefore, treble was boosted and lows were cut by a preemphasis curve which was removed in playback. The standard RIAA curve for turnover and rolloff (the amount and frequency for treble and bass, respectively) was not accepted universally until the 50's, and some fine preamps offered selectable values with presets for the common curves into the early transistor era."
Buy a card that will allow you to go from DAT to hard disk digitally. Make sure you get one that can handle the same digital standard the DAT recorder uses, i.e. S/PDIF (Sony/Phillips Digital Interface Format, sometimes referred to as "domestic") or AES/EBU ("professional").
Some of the solutions for the PC are the DigiDesign AudioMedia (see http://www.digidesign.com/), the Zefiro Acoustics ZA2 (see http://www.zefiro.com/), the AdB Digital Multiwav Pro (see http://www.adbdigital.com/), the Digital Audio Labs CardD+ (see http://www.digitalaudio.com/products.htm), or the Turtle Beach Fiji (see http://www.tbeach.com/products/fiji.htm). The CardD+ comes highly recommended. There may be newer versions of these products, so be sure to check out the web sites.
Visit http://www.digitalexperience.com/cards.html for a feature comparison of many different models.
An inexpensive S/PDIF card available from Computer Geeks (http://www.compgeeks.com/) was evaluated by some newsgroup readers in mid-1998. Apparently there were some problems with the physical dimensions of the card (too wide for some PC slots), the documentation is poor, and the voltage level for both input and output was TTL instead of standard S/PDIF. You're probably better off with one of the established brands unless you're sure about what you need.
For technical information on S/PDIF, check out http://www.plompy.co.uk/spdif/ and http://www.castaway.dircon.co.uk/.
You should record from the DAT onto your hard drive, and then record the CD from there. If you try to record directly from DAT you'll likely end up with a lot of wasted CD-Rs due to buffer underruns or minor mistakes. You should use Disc-At-Once recording for best results.
One issue you need to be aware of is that some older DAT recorders can only record at 48KHz, while CDs are recorded at 44.1KHz. If this is the case with your equipment, you will have to do a sample rate conversion. The DSP on cards like the ZA2 will do this for you, or you can use an audio editing program like CoolEdit or Sound Forge.
There *are* CD-R drives that have analog inputs, and can record directly from audio sources. See section (5-12).
If you use a DAT and haven't been to the DAT-heads home page, you should definitely check out http://www.atd.ucar.edu/rdp/dat-heads/.
If you want to manipulate audio DATs directly from your computer, you need a DDS drive with special firmware. The SCSI DDS drives that are typically sold for backups don't have the firmware required to handle DAT tapes. Most SGI workstations can do this, and Mac users should check out http://www.demon.co.uk/gallery/StudioDAT.html. If you have an Archive Python DDS drive, check out ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/DATlib.
Some other drives can be supported with appropriate firmware updates. See http://www.ncf.ca/~aa571/dat2wav.htm.
An interesting combination of technologies is the DAT-Link from http://www.tc.com/, which connects to the digital connectors on the DAT machine (or MD, DCC, or CD player) and the SCSI interface on a computer. The device can be controlled from other computers on a network.
If you're interested in mastering production audio CDs, you should take a look at http://www.sadie.com/.
There are two ways to do this. The first is to put the data on track 1 of the CD, and audio on the next several tracks (discs created this way are referred to as "mixed-mode" CDs). The CD-ROM drive will automatically look at track 1 and ignore all other tracks, so you'll be able to get at the data and -- depending on the operating system -- will be able to play the audio tracks. Remember that all of the tracks, both audio and data, need to be recorded in a single session. See section (3-2).
The down side of this is that audio CD players may attempt to play track 1, which can be obnoxious or downright harmful to audio equipment. Most modern CD players are smart enough to ignore data tracks, so this won't usually be a problem.
The other approach is to create a multisession disc with the audio tracks in the first session and the data track in the second. This is how CD Extra (the format formerly known as CD Plus) works. Audio CD players only look at the first session, and CD-ROM drives are (supposed to) start with the last session, so it all works out. Sony Music has some pages at http://www.cdextra.com/.
(NOTE: it appears that in some situations a Macintosh will not handle multi-session audio/data CD-R discs correctly. For example, a G3 with a DVD-ROM drive running Mac OS 8.6 works fine, but a G4 or iMac running Mac OS 9 will reject the disc as unreadable. The same system will handle pressed discs correctly -- only CD-Rs fail. The reason for this is not known.)
A common question is how to write the audio in the first session without gaps between tracks, because you can't use disc-at-once recording. (If you did use DAO recording, the disc would be closed, and you wouldn't be able to write the data track). With the right hardware and software, you can do "session-at-once" recording to write the audio without gaps, and purportedly there is a strange hack you can do with GEAR that has the same effect with certain recorders. (With GEAR, write the audio tracks in the first session using disc-at-once recording, but with "multisession" and "leave session open" set. Don't ask me for details, and don't be surprised if it doesn't work.)
What happens when you try to play one of these as audio in your CD-ROM drive? As with most things multisession, it depends on your drive. (The player that comes with Plextor CD-ROM drives does the right thing. If you're using a different drive, you're on your own.)
There's actually a third way to do this that involves putting the data
track into the extended pregap of the first audio track. Instead of the
audio starting at minute:second:block 00:02:00, the data starts there, and
the audio is written after. The pregap is adjusted accordingly. This
method never gained popularity because some drives started playing at
00:02:00 regardless.
Some CDs perversely put audio in the pregap. You can play it by starting to play track 1, then holding the "reverse" button until it seeks all the way to the start of the disc. Some digital audio extraction programs (e.g. "cdclip" from www.goldenhawk.com) allow you to specify block numbers instead of track numbers; these can be used to extract the "hidden" audio.
For example, _Factory Showroom_ by "They Might Be Giants" looks like this:
On a Mac, this is reasonably straightforward. A CD can be bootable if it has a bootable system folder on it. Tell the recording software that you want to make the CD bootable; this usually involves clicking in a checkbox before burning the first session. Then, copy a bootable system folder onto the disc. An easy way to create an appropriate system folder is to launch the system installer, tell it you want to do a "Custom" install, choose the "Universal System" option, and then install it onto the CD source volume.
Holding down the 'c' key while booting will cause the Mac to boot from an internal CD-ROM drive. Alternatively, the "Startup Disk" control panel will allow you to select a CD-ROM.
The rest of the section applies only to PCs, which are more challenging.
The BIOS or SCSI card on most newer machines support booting from CD-ROM, but on many older machines it's just not possible. Phoenix (the BIOS developer) and IBM have created the El Torito standard for doing this sort of thing. When the machine boots, if the BIOS recognizes a bootable image on the CD-ROM, it maps that image onto the A: floppy drive. (Depending on implementation, A: will move to B: and B: will go away.) From that point onward, it's just like booting a floppy.
Not surprisingly, the way you create a bootable CD-ROM is to take an image of a bootable floppy disk and write it in a specific way onto the CD. Many of the current CD writing programs, including Easy CD Creator and CDRWIN, will do the hard work for you.
You can find El Torito specifications and a "how to" guide at:
http://www.ptltd.com/products/specs.htmlIf you like to do things the hard way, step-by-step procedures with varying levels of detail can be found here:
http://www.ptltd.com/products/wp.html
http://www.cdpage.com/Compact_Disc_Variations/bootablecdarticle.htmThe "BOOTISO" utility may come in handy, and can be found here:
http://www.ozemail.com/~rossstew/drs/bootcd.html
http://nikko.simplenet.com/goldentime/bootcd01.htm
http://www.fadden.com/doc/bootcd.txt
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2996/index.htmlThe "mkbootcd" utility allows multi-boot catalogs:
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA004958/bootcd/index_e.htmlA helpful utility that supports multi-boot discs:
http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/You can learn how to make bootable Win95b/Win98 CD-ROMs here:
http://www.heise.de/ct/Service/English.htm/99/11/206/Complaints about "file is missing or corrupted" can be avoided with a freeware utility called IOPATCH, available from the site listed above at http://nikko.simplenet.com/goldentime/bootcd01.htm.
When booting the PC, you may need to change the boot order in the BIOS from the typical "A, C" to "A, SCSI, C", and configure the SCSI interface to attempt to boot from CD. On some adapters, the boot-up SCSI bus scan may take an extra second or two while the interface tries to determine if a bootable CD-ROM is present.
Some programs insist that bootable CD-ROMs be written in plain ISO-9660 format, not Joliet. One way around this is to write the bootable portion in the first session, and then write the rest of the data in a second session.
The El Torito standard allows CD-ROMs to have more than one bootable image, but none of the existing software support that.
If you're having trouble finding drivers for your CD-ROM drive, try the Win98 boot disk, or http://www.drivershq.com/.
This topic is largely outside the scope of this FAQ, so I'm not going to go into much depth. The Usenet newsgroup news:rec.desktop.video is more applicable. I'm not aware of an FAQ for that group, but the links found at http://www.videoguys.com/jump.htm will get you started.
You need a capture device to transfer the video to your hard drive. Capturing high-quality video can eat up 2MB or more per *second* of video at full resolution (640x480x24 at 60 fields per second for NTSC) with a reasonable degree of compression, so this isn't something to be undertaken lightly. The lower your quality requirements, the lower the bandwidth requirements. On a fast machine, you can even get away with just a TV tuner card, using the software from http://www.winvcr.com/.
If MPEG is your only interest, you might be better off with an MPEG-only card rather than a hobbyist video capture board. http://www.b-way.com/ and http://www.darvision.com/ are good places to look. The Broadway card has been given high marks for quality.
Once you've captured the video, you'll probably want to edit it, at least to clip out unwanted portions or add titles. Packages for doing this, like Adobe Premiere and Ulead MediaStudio, are usually included with the capture card. These will also let you adjust the resolution, color depth, and compression quality to output the video so that it's suitable for playback on double- or quad-speed CD-ROM drives.
You can convert AVI files to MPEG and vice-versa with a program from Ulead (see http://www.ulead.com/), Xing Technologies, or several other vendors. You should be able to create QuickTime or AVI movies using the compression codec of your choice from the video editing software.
Once created, you can write the AVI, MPEG, or MOV (QuickTime) file to a CD-ROM like you would anything else. If you'd like to view the disc in a DVD player or other VideoCD playback device, read the next section. Note that not all DVD players are capable of reading CD-R media, so if VideoCD on CD-R playback is important to you, check the DVD player feature set before you buy.
This section assumes you already have the video on your computer. If you don't know how to do that, read the previous section.
If you want to try creating a White Book VideoCD, which can be viewed on a VideoCD playback device like a Philips CD-i or from a computer with appropriate hardware and software, CD-R software packages like Easy CD Creator and WinOnCD can write MPEG-1 movies onto a CD in the necessary format. You have to be careful when creating the MPEGs, because if the encoding parameters (frame rate, number of pixels, etc) don't match the VideoCD parameters you may have trouble getting the CD writing software to accept the movie.
John Schlichther's "avi2vcd" combines standard tools into an easy-to-use program for Win95 and NT. You can use it to convert an AVI file into a VideoCD-compatible stream. http://www.mnsi.net/~jschlic1/.
If you're running Linux you should take a look at Bernhard Schwall's "avi2yuv" program. It converts M-JPEG movies created with popular video capture boards into a format accepted by the Berkeley MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoders (ftp://bmrc.berkeley.edu/pub/mpeg/). The README for avi2yuv lists the additional software packages (all of which are free and run under Linux) needed for creating MPEG movies complete with sound. Most (all?) of the utilities can also be built to run under DOS. http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/graphics/convert/.
"iFilmEdit", from http://www.cinax.com/Products/ifilmedit.html, will convert MPEG to VideoCD, and can reportedly convert a VideoCD .DAT file back into a plain MPEG file.
"VCDGear", from http://resource.simplenet.com/files/files.htm, converts between .dat and .mpg.
Easy CD Creator, as of v3.x, requires that an MPEG MCI driver be installed in the system (unlike CD Creator, it doesn't come with Xing's MPEG software). The popular VMPEG 1.7 doesn't quite work: ECDC can't see the audio, and you're not allowed to select the frame to view when shuffling streams around. If you have VMPEG installed as the MCI driver -- select "About ECDC" from the Help menu to check -- you need to *remove* VMPEG and then install ActiveMovie. (I removed under Win95 it by going into the Advanced section of the Multimedia control panel, expanding "Media Control Devices", selecting vmpegdll, and clicking on "Remove", but you may be able to use Add/Remove Programs instead.)
Finally, you should be aware that MPEG playback is rather CPU intensive, and it's possible to create movies that don't play very well on slower machines without hardware support. The PowerPC QuickTime MPEG extension (available from http://quicktime.apple.com/) works well, as does Microsoft ActiveMovie (http://www.microsoft.com/, available as part of MSIE 3.02 and later), but most of the UNIX players won't play the audio. Software MPEG playback is becoming easier as CPUs become more powerful, and it's much more common than it once was.
VideoCDs can only be read by CD-ROM drives capable of reading CD-ROM/XA discs. If your drive doesn't claim to support PhotoCD, you're probably out of luck. Microsoft's ActiveMovie and Apple's Video Player can play movies off of a VideoCD. Apple's AVP will scan the CD and present a list, but with ActiveMovie you need to look for and open the ".dat" files in the "mpegav" directory.
You can if you have several CD-R drives and the right software. Two examples are CD Rep from Prassi Software (section (6-1-21)) and DiscJuggler from Padus (section (6-1-27)).
Both products are SCSI multiplexors. You use your existing CD writing application (such as Easy-CD Pro 95) like you normally would, and the program sends the same commands to each of the CD-R drives. There are a number of limitations, notably that all devices must use the same command set and may need to have the same firmware revision. There may also be limits on the number of drives you can have attached at once.
DiscJuggler bills itself as "the professional CD Duplicator", CD Rep as "the ultimate professional recording solution". If you're interested in either of these, you should read the web pages for both, and compare the features available.
There are several hardware-based solutions to this, including CD-R units that support daisy-chaining, and control units that vary from the simple (a handful of units wired together) to the complex (robotic arms to move discs around). Most cost more than a Hyundai.
See http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/duplication.html for an overview of several different hardware solutions, or visit a vendor web page like http://www.princetondiskette.com/.
The following was part of an e-mail message from Jeff Arnold back in mid-1997:
"I do not recommend making "copies of copies" with SNAPSHOT. The reason this does not always work is because many CDROM readers do not perform error correction of the data when doing raw sectors reads. As a result, you end up with errors on the copy that may or may not be correctable. When you make a second-generation copy of the same disc, you will make a disc that has all of the errors of the first copy, plus all of the new errors from the second reading of the disc. The cumulative errors from multiple copies will result in a disc that is no longer readable."Some further explanation is needed here. The heart of the problem is the way that that the data is read from the source device. When a program does "raw" sector reads, it gets the entire 2352-byte block, which includes the CD-ROM error correction data (ECC) for the sector. Instead of applying the ECC to the sector data, the drive just hands back the entire block, including any errors that couldn't be corrected by the first C1/C2 layer of error correction (see section (2-17)). When the block is written to the CD-R, the uncorrected errors are written along with it.
This problem can be avoided by using "cooked" reads and writes. Rather than create an exact duplicate of the 2352-byte source sector, cooked reads pull off the error-corrected 2048-byte sector. The CD recorder regenerates the appropriate error correction when the data is written. Ideally SNAPSHOT would be able to do the error correction in software when operating in "raw" mode, but apparently there's no readily available code that does this. It could also read each block twice, once in raw mode and once in cooked, but that would double the read time.
This begs the question, why not just use cooked writes all the time? First of all, some recorders (e.g. Philips CDD2000 and HP4020i) don't support cooked writes. (Some others will do cooked but can't do raw, e.g. the Pinnacle RCD-5040.) Second, not all discs use 2048-byte MODE-1 sectors. There is no true "cooked" mode for MODE-2 data tracks; even a block length of 2336 is considered raw, so using cooked reads won't prevent generation loss.
It is important to emphasize that the error correction included in the data sector is a *second* layer of protection. A clean original disc may well have no uncorrectable errors, and will yield an exact duplicate even when copying in "raw" mode. After a few generations, though, the duplicates are likely to suffer some generation loss.
The original version of this quote went on to comment that Plextor and Sony
CD-ROM drives were not recommended for making copies of copies. The reason
they were singled out is because they are the only drives that explicitly
warned about this problem in their programming manuals. It is possible
that *all* CD-ROM drives behave the same way. (In fact, it is arguably the
correct behavior... you want raw data, you get raw data.)
The documentation for SNAPSHOT describes whether "raw" or "cooked" writes are recommended for several different CD-R drives. See the section on "USING THE /COOKED OPTION" in "snapshot.txt", found in the documentation for the DOS utilities at http://www.goldenhawk.com/.
The final answer to this question is, you can safely make copies of copies, so long as the disc is a MODE-1 CD-ROM and you're using "cooked" writes. Copies made with "raw" writes may suffer generation loss because of uncorrected errors.
Audio tracks don't have the second layer of ECC, and will be susceptible to the same generation loss as data discs duplicated in "raw" mode. Some drives may turn off some error-correcting features, such as dropped-sample interpolation, during digital audio extraction, or may only use them when extracting at 1x. If you want to find out what your drive is capable of, try extracting the same track from a CD several times at different speeds, then do a binary comparison on the results. PC owners can use the DOS "FC" command to do this, as described in section (3-3).
The easiest way is to use your favorite compression or encryption utility and process the files before putting them on the CD. However, this isn't transparent to the end user.
CRI-X3 enables programs like DoubleSpace to work on a CD. It's intended for a publisher or for significant internal use, and the licensing is priced accordingly. See http://www.somerset.net/crix3.html.
A straightforward solution is to write all of the files onto the disc as .ZIP files, and then use ZipMagic (formerly ZipFolders) to view the contents. Visit them at http://www.zipmagic.com/.
PGP at http://www.nai.com/ (was http://www.pgp.com) has some good encryption software, but none of it seems directly applicable to software distribution. PGPdisk, available for the Mac, might be useful but it isn't clear whether it can be used to distribute CD-ROMs.
ScramDisk, from http://www.scramdisk.clara.net/, writes files into encrypted "containers" on disk. It can be used with CD-ROMs, runs under Win95 and Win98, is free, and even includes source code.
http://www.c-dilla.com/ has information on CD-Secure 2, which allows publishers to distribute network-licensed or "pay for the parts you need" products, and CD-Compress 2, which provides a way to compress data transparently on production CDs. The web page didn't have pricing, so it's probably expensive.
EnCrypt-CD encrypts the blocks as they are written to CD. It's a shareware product, available from http://www.shareit.com/programs/102046.htm.
Encrypted Magic Folders from http://www.pc-magic.com/ claims to transparently encrypt data as it's being used. Whether it would work from a CD-ROM isn't stated.
You can install a cryptographic filesystem (called "CFS") under Linux; see http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Security-HOWTO-6.html#ss6.10. Create a crypto-fs, copy your data onto it, then use mkisofs with Rock Ridge extensions enabled to create an ISO-9660 disc image of the encrypted data. Burn the image to CD-ROM.
You may be able to use E4M, from http://www.e4m.net.
BestCrypt, from http://www.jetico.com/, lets you create encrypted virtual volumes in a file that can be stored on CD-R media.
You can get PC Guardian's CD-ROM encryption from http://www.pcguardian.com/.
Some section (6-7) for software.
Of course, it's not really necessary to use special software if you're just backing up your data files. Most CD creation programs will allow you to copy arbitrary files onto CD-ROM, and by using the Joliet standard or the UDF filesystem you can preserve long filenames. Unfortunately, if you're not using packet writing, the individual files may show up as read-only under DOS and Windows, so write permission must be re-enabled by hand when the files are restored. With packet writing applications like DirectCD or PacketCD, the correct file permissions are maintained.
Side note: the files aren't written to the disc as "read only". They're simply presented that way by Microsoft operating systems. Mac OS deals with this in a nicer way, showing unlocked files on write-protected media.
(DOS users can do "ATTRIB -R *.* /S". Linux users can su to root, mount the volume as MSDOS FAT, cd to the directory in question, and do "find . -print | xargs chmod +w" to enable write permission for all files in the current directory and in all subdirectories. If you've got the GNU utilities, use "find . -print0 | xargs -0 chmod +w" instead, especially if you're using the "vfat" fs. Of course, if you're a Linux user, you could just use mkisofs with the appropriate options and have Rock Ridge file permissions that match the originals.)
One thing to be careful of on Windows-based PCs: most programs that put files on CD don't preserve the *short* file names that are automatically generated for files with long file names. This presents a problem because the short form is often stored in the Registry and INI files instead of the long form (try searching your Registry for "~1"). When your system is restored, it may not be able to find the files anymore.
A way to work around this is to use a backup program that understands only the short filenames, and save the long ones with LFNBK. A program called DOSLFNBK at http://www8.pair.com/dmurdoch/programs/doslfnbk.htm may be more convenient than LFNBK.
(Some notes for Mac users appear at the very end. Most of this is for Windows users.)
The "autorun" feature of Windows 95 and later allows a program to be executed right after the disc is inserted. For this to work, the system must have autorun enabled, and Auto Insert Notification ("AIN") must be on for the CD-ROM drive. See section (4-1-1) for more information on AIN and the use of "TweakUI" to modify settings. It may also be necessary, in some configurations, to close the last session on the disc, or AIN will not work.
When preparing a CD for Windows, put a text file called "autorun.inf" in the root directory that contains something like this:
[autorun]The CD-ROM will be shown in the "My Computer" window with the specified icon. If the disc is inserted on a system with AIN and autorun enabled, the program named will be launched. (If you manually turned auto-insert notification off, you may need to reboot before the feature is re-enabled.)
open=filename.exe
icon=someicon.ico
Incidentally, the "root" directory is the top level of the disc, e.g. "D:\". (If you viewed a directory hierarchy as a tree growing upward, the topmost directory would be at the root of the tree.)
Here's a more complicated example:
[autorun]Taking it line by line, this says:
open = setup.exe /i
icon = setup.exe, 1
shell\configure = &Configure...
shell\configure\command = setup.exe /c
shell\install = &Install...
shell\install\command = setup.exe /i
shell\readme = &Read Me
shell\readme\command = notepad help\readme.txt
shell\help = &Help
shell\help\command = winhlp32 help\helpfile.hlp
[autorun]An alternative to "start", called "shellout", is available from the "files" section on http://resource.simplenet.com/. The advantage it has over "start" is that it doesn't pop up a DOS window, but it may also be useful for some WinNT configurations where the "start" command can't be found.
open=start index.htm
For more information on autorun:
http://www.gui.com.au/avdf/oct95/samp_autoplay.htmlA program that will allow you to test autoplay without burning a CD:
http://www.microsoft.com/msj/defaulttop.asp?page=/msj/0499/win32/win320499top.htm
http://www.connect.net/gstrope/autotest.htm(Actually, if you SUBST a folder onto a drive letter, the autorun feature in Win95 will scan the new drive. For example, "SUBST J: \goodies\NewCD". This technique is also useful for testing out a CD-ROM you're preparing.)
Some simple, configurable autorun applications (launchers and menus) are available, most as shareware:
http://www.powerup.com.au/~calypso/index.htm
http://www.phdcc.com/helpindex/ShellRun.htm
http://www.mediachance.com/
http://www.pgd.dk/
http://hyper-publish.com/
You can use the Macintosh equivalent of Autorun (QuickTime 2.0 Autostart) to automatically launch an application or document on the Mac. The "-auto" flag of mkhybrid (6-1-32) lets you specify this.
Changing the icon on the Mac can be done by using Toast to record a disc image (record by "Volume" instead of "Files and Folders"). Change the icon on the disc image file from the Command-I window in the Finder, then record it.
The easiest way is to compare the original with the copy. If the disc was burned from an ISO-9660 image file, programs like Easy-CD Pro 95 will do a comparison of the disc with the original. Toast for the Mac will automatically verify after writing if requested. You can also use something like CD-R Verifier from http://www.cdrom-prod.com/cd-r_verifier.html or CDCchedk from http://Fusion.zejn.si/ to check the contents of an entire CD-ROM easily.
Another way is to do a recursive file-by-file comparison. Programs that compute CRCs on files and then compare them (meant primarily for virus-checking) will work. Another way is to use the UNIX "diff" utility, which is available for Win95 (along with many other similar utilities) from http://www.reedkotler.com/.
If you had copied the contents of C:\MyData onto a CD-R at E:\, you would use:
diff -q -r C:\MyData E:The "-q" flag tells it to report if the files differ, but not show what the differences are, and the "-r" flag says to descend into directories recursively.
There are many other options. A utility called "treediff", available from the Simtel archives (http://www.simtel.com/archive/index.htm), may be helpful. http://www.funduc.com/directory_toolkit.htm has a shareware program with some relevant features. http://www.araxis.com/ has an evaluation copy of PMdiff, available for Windows and native OS/2. You can get "FileSync" from http://www.fileware.co.uk/.
You can also use Microsoft's WinDiff, which unlike some of the programs mentioned earlier understands long filenames. It can be found on Microsoft's recent operating system discs, e.g. on Win98 it lives in \tools\reskit\file\windiff.exe. It used to be available for download from ftp.microsoft.com, but they rearrange that site frequently, so there's not much point in including a URL.
An alternative to windiff is xdiff, from http://www.wookie.demon.co.uk/xdiff/.
Rocksoft Pty has a product called Veracity (http://www.veracity.com/) that can check the integrity of a directory tree.
If you *really* want to verify your discs, try http://www.audiodev.com/.
The following is an excerpt from the http://www.goldenhawk.com/ web site. CDRWIN is one of the few available programs that can copy CD+G discs.
"To backup CD+G discs, you must have one of the following recorders...There may be other units that work as readers or writers. Check the documentation from the manufacturer to be sure.
Hewlett Packard 7500 / 7570 / 8100 / 8110 / 8200 / 8210 / 9100 / 9200All Yamaha recorders (except the CDR100 and CDR102), the PX-R412C, and the HP8100/8110 are the only models that are capable of reading as well as writing CD+G discs. If you do not have one of these models, then you will have to purchase another CDROM device that can read CD+G discs.
Panasonic CW-7501
Plasmon CDR4240
Plextor PX-R412C (must have firmware version 1.07)
Plextor PX-R820T / PX-W4220T / PX-W8220T)
Sony CRX100E / CRX110E / CRX120E / CRX140E
Yamaha All Models
The following CDROM drives can read CD+G discs...
Plextor 4Plex Plus"
Plextor 8Plex (not recommended)
Plextor 12Plex
Plextor 12/20Plex
Plextor 14/32Plex
Sony 76S (not recommended)
Sony 415 (only works well at 1x reading speed)
Shareware software for playing back CD+G discs on the PC or Macintosh is available from http://www.karaoke.com/downcdg.html. For creating your own CD+G discs, see CD+G Creator in section (6-1-52). See also http://www.mtu.com/.
You don't. The CD-ROM doesn't actually have that much data on it. Some CD publishers use a trick where they reference the same spot on the disc several times with overlapping files. If you try to do a file-by-file copy from the disc onto your hard drive, you'll end up with several copies of the same blocks, and more data than can fit on a CD-ROM.
VideoCDs often appear to have individual files that are 700MB or more. In this case, they really *are* that big. They're written in a special format that drops error correction in favor of more space. This works fine for video data, but is definitely not recommended for ordinary data.
If you want to duplicate a CD-ROM, you should either use a program meant for the purpose (Adaptec's CD Copier, Golden Hawk's CDRWIN, etc), or extract the data track as a single ISO-9660 image. Some software is more capable of dealing with complex CDs than others, so if you have a particular kind of CD in mind (such as VideoCD) you should check the capabilities of the software before making a purchase.
There are a large number of companies that will do modest production runs of pressed CDs, but listing them is beyond the scope of this FAQ.
Do a web search on "CD duplication" and "CD replication", or check out http://www.cd-webstore.com/BurningIssues.html (a licensed-access web site from the www.cd-info.com folks).
Sometimes a disc submitted for duplication will be rejected due to E32 (uncorrectable) errors. If you have a disc rejected, make sure you are using disc-at-once recording mode -- the gaps left between tracks by track-at-once mode are sometimes interpreted as errors. If the problems persist, try changing to a different kind of media, or even a different recorder.
Most CD recorders are capable of doing this, given the right software. The key is to use disc-at-once recording instead of track-at-once.
Some programs give you a great deal of control. Golden Hawk's CDRWIN (6-1-7) will let you specify the gap size for each track, down to zero, and set the location of the track and index marks. You can put each track in a separate file or have the entire recording in a single file. Other programs, like ECDC (6-1-26), are easier to use but less flexible.
You will almost certainly need to use disc-at-once recording. Most drives insist on inserting a two-second gap between tracks when track-at-once recording is used, and those that don't will at best leave an instant of silence between tracks. You can eliminate the gaps from a TAO recording by putting the entire CD into one track, but then you lose the ability to seek immediately to the start of a song.
Most PC and Mac software support both TAO and DAO recording modes. It's prudent to check the web pages before you buy.
If you want to break up a long recording into several WAV files (one per track), it's important to split tracks on precise 2352-byte boundaries. If you don't, you'll get tiny periods of silence or noise, lasting less than 1/75th of a second, that may be clearly audible depending on the context. A handy Windows utility called "CDWAV", available from http://www.cdwave.com/, is good at splitting large WAV files into smaller ones, and can do so on block boundaries.
If you want to mix WAV tracks together, take a look at Multiquence, http://www.goldwave.com/multiquence/index.html. A simpler merge utility is "wavmerge", from http://resource.simplenet.com/files/.
The first step is to convert from whatever format the sound is in to WAV or AIFF. In some cases (e.g. MP3), many of the popular CD recording programs will do the conversion for you. If not, you will need to convert it to 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo PCM format. Once it's in WAV or (on the Mac) AIFF format, you can record it as you would audio taken from other CDs. Be sure to play it back once after you convert it to make sure that it came out okay.
For a tutorial on converting CD-DA to MP3 and vice-versa, see http://www.cdpage.com/Compact_Disc_Consulting/Tutorial/mp3.html. The "getting started" guide at http://help.mp3.com/help/ is worth reading, and the newsgroup FAQ for alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* at http://www.mp3-faq.org/ is also useful.
There may or may not be a converter for the format you're interested in. Here are some links to try:
MIDI
See http://www.howstuffworks.com/mp3.htm for an intro to MP3 technology.
http://www.sonicspot.com/multimediaconverters.html has a collection of converters for different formats.
If you *really* want to be able to play MP3-compressed songs while driving down the freeway, check out http://utter.chaos.org.uk/~altman/mp3mobile/ (or the commercial counterpart at http://www.empeg.com/).
CD-Text is a standard that allows disc and track information to be embedded on an audio CD. The data can be read by some CD players, providing a way to have disc information available without having to enter it manually or look it up in a database.
Adding CD-Text to the discs you record requires a compatible recorder and capable software. Support was scarce in mid-1999, but is more common now.
The currently available software supports writing of album title, artist names, and track titles, and can copy discs with CD-Text data already on them. Storing lyrics within the tracks is possible but not widely supported.
Not all CD players and CD-ROM drives can read CD-Text. If this feature is important to you, check the specifications before you buy.
You need to include the content and a browser on the CD. Some products that might be helpful are:
Incidentally, if you burn the disc with plain ISO-9660, you don't have to worry about the upper-case filenames conflicting with lower-case names in URLs. The filesystem code on Windows, Mac, and UNIX converts the names to upper case before comparing them. This may not hold for other formats, e.g. Rock Ridge.
In general, you don't. The only reason you'd need to clean a recorder or (for that matter) a CD-ROM drive is if you went and stuck your finger on the lens. Cleaning kits and well-intentioned Q-tips are unnecessary and potentially dangerous. If you push too hard on the lens while cleaning and damage the mounting, it will no longer matter how clean it is.
Some people report drives coming back to life after a careful cleaning, so there may be some value in doing so. [ Personal note: I've never had to clean a lens in *any* CD player, including a flip-up top-loading boom box that I've had since mid-1990. I can *see* the dust inside, and I can see the lens, but it has no problem playing discs. I can't imagine how a recorder that's only a year or two old is going to collect enough dust to fail. ]
If you have an overwhelming desire to clear loose dust out of your recorder, and can't or don't want to send it to a service center, use gentle(!) bursts of compressed air.
The Repair FAQ at http://www.repairfaq.org/ has a section about CD-ROM drives that seems relevant. Find the "Compact Disc Players and CDROM Drives" section, and skip down to part 4. One relevant quote, from section 4.3:
"I generally don't consider CD lens cleaning discs to be of much value for preventive maintenance since they may just move the crud around. However, for pure non-greasy dust (no tobacco smoke and no cooking grease), they probably do not hurt and may do a good enough job to put off a proper cleaning for a while longer. However, since there are absolutely no sorts of standards for these things, it is possible for a really poorly designed cleaning disc to damage the lens. In addition, if it doesn't look like a CD to the optical pickup or disc-in sensor, the lens cleaning disc may not even spin. So, the drawer closes, the drawer opens, and NOTHING has been accomplished!"
It depends on your recorder, media, and who you talk to. For example, some informal testing with the venerable Yamaha CDR-100 determined that it worked best at 4x speed with media certified for 4x writes. 1x worked almost as well, but 2x would occasionally produce discs with unrecoverable errors.
With audio CDs, the results are more subjective. Some people have asserted that you should always write at 1x, others have stated that 2x may actually be better. It depends on the recorder, media, player, and your ears. Try it both ways and listen. See section (4-18) for some notes on how you can write the same set of bits to two CDs and still have audible differences.
CD-R media is written by heating up tiny sections of the disc. When the disc spins faster, the laser has less time to shine on a particular spot, so the laser has to be controlled differently. Different formulations of media may require a different "write strategy" at certain speeds, and each recorder may adjust its write strategy differently to accommodate those speeds. This can potentially result in combinations of recorder and media that work perfectly at one speed but fail miserably at another.
Put simply, there's more to writing at high speed than just spinning faster. There is no One True Answer to this question. Do what works best for you.
See http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/History/Commentary/Parker/stcroix.html for commentary about "write strategy" selection and different media types.
See the graphs at http://www.digido.com/meadows.html for an examination of BLER (BLock Error Rate) with different recorders, different media, and different recording speeds. A few of the graphs show the same recorder and same media at different speeds, and in some cases the BLER increased at higher speeds, while in others it decreased.
In general, you don't need them. Software that burns CD-Rs has the necessary drivers built in.
If you want to use your recorder as a CD-ROM drive, you may need drivers for it. See section (5-8).
(This section only applies to people in the USA. International copyright laws apply in most other countries, but there may be local variations.)
You are allowed to make an archival backup of software, but the same doesn't necessarily hold true for music. The Home Rights Recording Act will allow you to duplicate music under certain circumstances.
A discussion of the topic, including details on past and pending legislation, can be found on the Home Recording Rights Coalition web site at http://www.hrrc.org/. The text of the Home Rights Recording Act can also be found here.
The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the music industry, has a web site at http://www.riaa.com/.
An article entitled, "Copying Music to CD: The Right, the Wrong, and the Law" is at http://www.emediapro.net/EM1998/starrett2.html.
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/bad_laws/dat_tax.html has some relevant information and pointers.
http://www.bmi.com/ and http://www.ascap.com/ have yet more perspectives on legislation.
Of course.
The only possible basis in fact for the, "if it was recorded at 2x, you can't read it faster than 2x" rumors is that some drives have trouble reading CD-R media. Discs that are hard to read when spinning at 12x may become easier to read when spinning at 4x. It has also been noted that some recorders will write more legible discs at certain speeds (e.g. the Yamaha CDR-100, which works better at 1x or 4x than it does at 2x). None of this should lead anyone to conclude, however, that the write speed and read speed are tied directly together. The reader, writer, and media all have a role in determining how quickly a CD-R can spin and be readable.
It's also the case that discs written at high speed (say 8x) can be read by drives *slower* than 8x. So if you're distributing discs to people with old 4x CD-ROM drives, you don't have to worry about them not being able to read at 8x. Of course, if the CD-ROM is poorly constructed, or the writer is producing marginal discs at high speeds, you might see evidence to the contrary, but there is no technical barrier to reading discs recorded at 8x or 12x on a slower drive.
This is a tricky one because of issues with long filenames and file attributes. Mac CD-ROMs are typically burned with an HFS filesystem, not ISO-9660, and WinNT uses a different scheme for long filenames (Joliet) than UNIX does (Rock Ridge). Some variants of UNIX will recognize the Joliet names, but neither Windows nor the Mac understands Rock Ridge. You might be able to use an HFS CD-ROM on a platform other than the Mac, but if you're distributing software, it's not wise to assume that your customers will be able to do the same.
The easiest way to create a disc that will work on all platforms is to use plain level 1 ISO-9660, with 8+3 filenames and no special file attributes. If you need to include Mac applications as well as data -- or pretty much anything with a resource fork -- this simple approach won't work. Also, some older versions of Mac OS and HP/UX might not work as expected unless you record the disk without the usually-invisible version number (";1").
There is an Apple-defined extension to ISO-9660 that allows the Mac file and creator types to be present on an ISO-9660 filesystem. This allows most of the features of the Mac filesystem on an otherwise plain ISO-9660 disc. It's not clear how many of the software products in section (6-1) take advantage of this, but "mkhybrid" (section (6-1-32)) seems to. Section (3-5-3) has a URL to an Apple tech note with implementation details.
A common way to construct a disc for the Mac and PC is as a "hybrid" disc that has both an ISO-9660 filesystem and an HFS filesystem. To save space, the data itself is shared by both sections of the disc. This is possible because the ISO-9660 directory entries use an absolute block offset on the disc, so they can point at data residing in the HFS filesystem.
There are various applications that will do HFS/ISO-9660 hybrids. Adaptec's Toast for the Mac and "mkhybrid" for the PC are two examples. Search for "hybrid" in the list of software in section (6-1) for more examples.
The issue of Joliet vs. Rock Ridge can also be solved, by including both kinds of extensions on the same disc. The "mkhybrid" program can include Joliet, Rock Ridge, and HFS all on the same disc. You can even have files appear on one kind but not the other, and rename files on the fly, allowing you to have a "readme.txt" with different contents for Mac, UNIX, and Windows.
With a little searching you can find an audio CD that will cause your CD player to show a negative track time when one track finishes and the next begins. The negative sections are usually filled with silence, but some rare discs will have material in them. If you seek directly to the track, you don't see (or hear) the negative-time section.
The trick here is also described in section (3-14). The start position of an audio track listed in the TOC (Table of Contents) doesn't have to point to the actual start of the track. When using CDRWIN-style cue sheets, the actual start of the track is at "index 00", and the place where the player seeks to is "index 01".
The distance between the actual start of the track and the TOC-specified start is called the pre-gap. The Red Book standard requires that index 01 in track 01 be at least two seconds (150 sectors) from the start of the CD.
You can specify additional index markers, but most CD players will simply ignore them. Index 01 is the only value written into the TOC. Some CD-ROM games have tried to use the index markers as a form of copy protection, because they won't get copied automatically by many programs.
If you want to create your own discs with "hidden tracks", you need a
program that gives you full control over where the index markers go (CDRWIN
is one such program). Combine two (or more) tracks with an audio editor
into a single file. Specify the file as a single track in the cue sheet,
and set "index 01" to a point right after the "hidden" song finishes.
There are other ways to approach this, but this is probably the most straightforward.
Absolutely. Infected CD-ROMs are every bit as nasty as infected floppies, if not worse: you can't disinfect the source media. It is prudent to scan your files before creating a CD-ROM for distribution, and it's not a bad idea to scan the CD-ROM afterward (in case somebody has cleverly infected your CD writing software).
The dangers of boot sector viruses on bootable CD-ROMs are probably low. Because the boot sector is created directly by the recording software, and can't be modified after it has been written, the opportunity for infection is small.
You don't. With a CD-ROM you could use multisession writes to hide unwanted data, but you can't create multisession audio CDs. (Well, you can create them, but nothing outside of a CD-ROM drive will be able to play the tracks outside the first session.)
On CD-RW media, it might be possible to overwrite an individual track. You would need software that supported this capability. Erasing the disc and starting over is probably easier.
Requests for information on how to copy games like "Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines" occasionally sprout up on the newsgroups. Generally the publisher has employed some form of copy protection that prevents the disc from being duplicated easily. If you try to play the game from the duplicate, the game will usually act as if the CD-ROM weren't present and tell you to insert it.
Most publishers are well aware that there is no such thing as an unbreakable copy protection scheme. It is possible though to implement a method effective enough to slow the tide. If you don't believe that, start counting posts the next time a popular game with decent protection is released.
If you're looking for information, the most appropriate places to search are "warez" newsgroups and web sites. Searching the net for tips is a good way to get started. Be forewarned that any "cracks" you download may very well also be viruses, and that if you give away or accept a copy of the disc from someone else you are probably breaking the law.
Aiding and abeting the illegal distribution of copyrighted works is not part of this document's charter. There are plenty of newsgroups and web sites devoted to the subject, so please don't waste bandwidth in "legitimate" forums asking for cracks.
If you're using CD-R media, and you're not using a packet writing program like DirectCD, you can stop reading now. You don't need to prepare CD-R discs for conventional recording, and you can't erase them no matter how hard you try. (Note for the nit-pickers: "erase" means removing the data so that the disc can be re-used. Procedures involving microwave ovens and belt sanders don't qualify.)
If you want to erase a CD-RW disc, use the software that came with your CD-ReWritable drive. Somewhere in the army of applications and mountain of menus is the command you're looking for.
If you're going to be using packet writing, a little formatting will be necessary. The application should offer to do this automatically the first time you insert a blank disc. The fixed-packet formatting that DirectCD does for CD-RW discs takes about 50 minutes on a 2x rewritable drive.
The difference between "erase" and "quick erase" is that the former erases the entire disc, while the latter just stomps on the Table of Contents (TOC). It's like erasing the directory off of a floppy disk. The file data is still there, but since there's nothing pointing to it, the disc appears empty. (Some people have asked if it's possible to recover data from a quick-erased disc. The general answer is, "don't count on it".)
The difference between "format" and "fast format" (such as is offered on the HP8100/Sony CRX100) is of a different nature. Both format the entire disc, and both operate at the same speed, but the "fast" format allows you to use the drive before formatting has completed. After a few minutes, you are allowed to access the drive while the formatting process continues in the background.
Incidentally, most conventional (pre-mastering) software will refuse to record on a disc that has been formatted for packet writing. In some cases the error message may be a confusing remark that insists the disc isn't writable.
A common problem when creating an audio CD compiled from many different sources is that the sound is at different volume levels. This can be slight or, after you've cranked up the volume to hear the first track, very much the opposite of slight.
There are actually two issues that determine how loud the music sounds. The first is the signal amplitude. Put simply, if you open a WAV file, this is how close to maximum the squiggly line gets. You can adjust the WAV file so that the highest amplitude is at maximum with the "normalize" function of a sound editor. Some programs, such as Adaptec's Spin Doctor, may even do this for you automatically.
The second issue is the dynamic range compression. This differs from data rate compression in that it doesn't make the WAV file smaller. Instead, it can make the quiet parts louder and the loud parts quieter.
A CD-DA has a dynamic range of about 96dB. If a symphony is recorded with a range of more than 110dB, it has to be compressed to fit on a CD-DA. In practice, you don't want whispers to be inaudible and shouts to be deafening, so the audio is often squeezed into an even narrower range. Radio stations often compress their broadcasts "up" so that music can be heard more clearly by listeners in cars or work environments.
(According to Ken Pohlmann's _Principles of Digital Audio_, 4th edition, page 35, ideal 16-bit quantization of a sinusoidal waveform is 6.02n+1.76 decibels, or 98.08dB. Using "dithering" techniques, it's possible to extend the effective resolution well beyond this, because of the way the ear perceives sound. There is an *excellent* introductory article at http://www.digido.com/ditheressay.html. Compression is more often employed on pop music recordings, where louder is better, than something like classical music, where accurate reproduction is desirable.)
To make a CD that sounds like it has equal volume across all tracks, you need to have the average sound level uniform across all tracks and have the peak volume be about the same on all tracks. One program that does essentially this is Audiograbber v1.40 and later, available as shareware from http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/. (As of v1.41, you went into "Normalize Settings" and hit the "Advanced" button.) The tool is a little clumsy for serious audio mastering, but should do fine for preparing a "mix" CD that you'll be listening to in your car.
If you aren't dissuaded yet, http://www.digido.com/compression.html has an excellent article on compression, intended primarily for the budding recording artist but a good general reference nonetheless. Cool Edit 96, available as shareware from http://www.syntrillium.com/, can do different kinds of compression, and is fun to play with.
Sidebar: "dB" is the abbreviation for "decibel", a signal strength ratio measured on a logarithmic scale. Every time you add 6 dB, the signal level doubles. Detailed information is available from the Acoustics FAQ at http://www.Point-and-Click.com/Campanella_Acoustics/faq/faq.htm.
A commonly posed question from the newsgroups: "what software can do bit-for-bit copies?"
There isn't any. If it helps to have a (convenient albeit somewhat inaccurate) mental image, picture a long string of bits arranged in a spiral. There are bits at the start of the spiral that you can't copy (the lead-in area), there are bits outside the spiral that you can usually copy if you request them ("raw" MODE-1 CD-ROM ECC and sector goop), and there are bits *under* the spiral that are blurry and hard to see (the subcode data).
Making a "bit-for-bit" copy of a disc would require reading the data at the lowest possible level, something that no production CD-ROM drive is capable of doing. Even if it were possible, there aren't any CD recorders that can write that sort of data.
Because of these limitations, you have to read a sector of data as a sector of data, not as a collection of frames scattered over half the circumference of the disc. You can read the sector in "raw" mode, scan for index markers, and try to extract CD+G data tucked into the R-W subcodes, but there's a good chance that you won't quite synchronize everything up when you write it back.
Bear in mind that CD-ROM drives and CD recorders were designed for people who want to read and write data, not decipher arcane standards documents and perform their own error correction. Creating exact one-off copies was not a major consideration of the original design.
In general, however, you don't *need* a "bit-perfect" duplicate of the original. If what you're copying is a simple MODE-1 CD-ROM, you can make an "identical" copy by reading the sectors off the original and writing them to a duplicate. For most situations this is good enough: you have copied the bits that matter.
On the other hand, if it's a copy-protected CD-ROM with index markers in strange places, you have to use software and hardware that can see the "blurry bits" reliably and copy them.
See also section (3-1-1), (3-18), (3-39), and (6-1-49).
The name of a CD-ROM is determined by the CD-ROM volume label. This determines how the disc shows up on the Mac or Windows.
The ISO-9660 standard limits the characters in the volume name to the same set of characters allowed in a filename, namely A-Z, 0-9, '.', and '_'. Some programs enforce strict adherence to the standard, while others are more relaxed.
For example, if you wanted to create a disc with Nero that had a hyphen in the volume name, you would go into the "file options" and change the Character Set to "ASCII". Nero will then allow a broader range of characters. Other programs may or may not have similar features.
Remember that standards are guidelines, not laws enforced by threat of punishment. You are welcome to create discs that deviate from the standard in any way you choose. The only price you will pay is that, if you stray too far from the standard, your disc may not be readable by everyone. For the specific case of a volume label, deviations are pretty harmless.
Applications like "Toast" insist on showing the data track only. You can play the audio tracks, but you can't seem to extract them.
SoundJam MP from http://www.soundjam.com/ is reported to do the trick.
There are two basic approaches: (1) run the uninstall program, or (2) make changes to several entries in the Windows registry.
You CANNOT disable it by killing a task.All these really do is stop the DirectCD control interface from running. The icon is gone from the system tray, but DirectCD itself is still active, which you can verify by inserting an unfinalized packet-written disc. If DirectCD were actually disabled, the disc would be unreadable.
You CANNOT disable it by un-checking it in msconfig.
You CANNOT disable it by removing it from the system StartUp list.
Writing data to such a disc without the UI active can lead to data corruption, because some of the safeguards are no longer in place. It's like you've taken the steering wheel off the car while it's still rolling.
If you do choose to use one of the "easy" methods, you will probably be okay so long as you don't try to write to a disc with packet writing.
NOTE: the DirectCD icon in the system tray is different from and independent
of the "Create CD" icon that Easy CD Creator 4 adds to the system tray. You
can get rid of that by right-clicking on it and telling it not to load.
You don't. The ISO-9660 specification requires that the files appear sorted.
Most modern OSs sort directories anyway, so unless you're greatly concerned about the appearance under DOS, there's little value here anyway.
Encrypt the data on it. See section (3-19) for options.
That depends on what you're trying to accomplish. There are two issues that complicate matters:
Some people have CD players that will play songs from every session. If you do, and compatibility with other players isn't important, you can write each group of tracks into its own session. The down side of this approach is that there is an appreciable amount of overhead when opening a new session (23MB for the first and 14MB for each additional one).
If your hard drive has enough space, you can just keep the WAV files on the drive, and burn the disc all at once. If it doesn't, you can write the tracks to a CD-R or CD-RW disc as WAV files on CD-ROM, and record from there. Write a new CD-R or CD-RW every time you get more tracks. (The advantage to using CD-ROM is that additional error correction is used.)
It isn't possible to take the contents of a DVD-Video or DVD-ROM and record the whole thing onto a CD-R, unless the DVD is nearly empty. The capacity of DVD discs is considerably greater.
You could, of course, capture the video from a DVD-Video disc with a video capture board, re-encode it with MPEG-1, and write that as a VideoCD. The quality would be VHS-grade though. (You can get better results with MP3 audio and MPEG-4 video, but the process is a little convoluted. See http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/support/dvd2mpeg4.html.)
If you're only interested in the audio portion of a DVD-Video, you can extract the AC3 audio directly from the .VOB file, using some freely available utilities (notably "ac3dec" and the elusive "DeCSS"). You will need to convert the audio from 48KHz to 44.1KHz. You can also capture it under Windows with Total Recorder (http://www.highcriteria.com/).
The story is the same with DVD-ROM: you can probably copy it to a CD-R if it will fit. If the contents only took up about 650MB, though, it probably wouldn't have been shipped on a DVD-ROM.
A program that copies the entire disc as an image should work. Don't try to copy it as a collection of files.
You can create a hybrid HFS (Mac), Rock Ridge (UNIX), and Joliet (Windows) CD-ROM with "mkhybrid" in section (6-1-32). The output of the program is a simple ISO-9660 image file. It stands to reason that you should be able to copy such discs as easily as you can create them.
FAQ Copyright © 2000 by Andy McFadden. All Rights Reserved.