Last-modified: 1997/09/14
Version: 1.11
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 fancy formats require more sophisticated software, such as Jeff Arnold's SNAPSHOT.
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.
("The nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from." -- Andrew S. Tannenbaum)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 reading audio tracks as digital data. Jitter, described in section section (2-15), is also a problem for most drives.
If you're just interested in extracting digital audio, you don't even need a CD-R unit, just a CDROM drive that supports DA extraction and some software. See http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~psyche/cdda/ for the CD-DA FAQ and a variety of software.
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.
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.
The quality of the CD-R audio output 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).
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 noise.
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 (for a .WAV file it's usually the first 44 bytes).
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 suffering from buffer underruns during the write process. If there are clicks in the copy on your hard drive, then your method of extracting audio is flawed (see section (3-2)).
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. 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.
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.
Some CDROM 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.
If you must use track-at-once, make sure you're writing it all in one session. Most, if not all, CD players won't see audio tracks beyond the first session.
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).
Finally, some people who got "static" in audio recorded on an HP 4020i found that reducing the DMA transfer rate to 2MB/sec helped.
Note that this software does NOT defeat the copy protection.
Incidentally, posting requests or advertisements for pirated software on one of the 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.
See http://www.adaptec.com/support/cdrec/filename.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.
Level 2 ISO-9660 allows longer filenames and deeper directory structures (32 levels instead of 8), 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.
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.)
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.
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 CDROMs. A description of the extensions is available from http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/fl/fl_36.html.
The spec can be found at http://www.ms4music.com/devl/dvjoliet.htm
Linux can be taught to read Joliet discs by patching the kernel. See http://www-plateau.cs.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/joliet.html. Ditto for OS/2; see: http://service.software.ibm.com/os2ddpak/html/miscellb/os_2warp/updatedc/index.htm.
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, and require additional hardware to be played on a PC.
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.
Some newer formats, like CD Extra, allow or even require such information to be included on the CD.
Some recent CD players are advertised as "CD-Text Ready". These use the CD-Text data embedded in the R-W subcode channel to display disc and track title data. (It remains to be seen whether this will be usable by CD audio programs running on a computer.)
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.
There *are* 80-minute CD-R blanks, but they're very expensive, and may not work on all systems. The longest possible CD-R is 79 minutes, 59 seconds, 74 frames long, because of the way that the last possible start time of the lead-out is encoded. Such discs are supposedly available directly from TDK (USA sales +1 800 835 8273).
It may be possible to create a longer CD by suppressing the leadout, but it's not clear if this is easy or even a good idea.
http://www.kodak.com/digitalImaging/aboutPhotoCD/aboutPCD.shtml has the glossy brochure information, with some Kodak contact information.
http://www.idiom.com/~ggs/ gives you step-by-step instructions and software for creating "real" PhotoCD discs with Kodak's software. The program that Kodak provides (for a fee) will only write to Kodak CD recorders, but a translator available from the web site will allow it to work with GEAR or CDRWIN. Follow the Kodak links on that page.
Incidentally, if you're planning to convert your own pictures, you will need a way to get your images digitzed in the first place. Digital cameras like the Apple QuickTake will work, as will video capture boards or frame grabbers.
If you need the format to be more flexible, perhaps with separate executables for Macs and PCs, you'll want to build a "hybrid" CD that has two sets of files on it. Adaptec's Toast for the Mac is widely recommended for this. See section (6) for other options.
MS-DOS lets you see the first data session. Win95 lets you see the last data session. Adaptec's "session selector" will let you choose which session you see, but it only works with SCSI CD-ROM drives.
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 that 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 driver you have installed.
You need to connect the analog output from your record player through a pre-amp (which both pre-amplifies the signal and equalizes it to RIAA standards) to a board in your PC that can digitize analog audio and store it on your hard drive.
You can use the A/D (analog-to-digial) 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 such as the Symetrix 620, and feed the digital output from that into the computer (another way of accomplishing the same thing is to record to an audio DAT tape and then use the digital output on the DAT recorder; see the next section for details).
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 sort of problem is easy to detect; record something, play it back, and see if it sounds different.
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. Noise reduction is performed by a program called DART that can be upgraded to a much better version (DART Pro) for a modest fee.
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:
Cool Edit optionally leaves a blob of data at the end of the .WAV file, which is legal in the file format but not expected by some utilities. To avoid this, go into the "Options" menu and select "Info" (for Cool Edit 96, it's under the "View" menu). There is a check box here labeled "Fill * fields automatically". Make sure the box is unchecked, and don't put any information into the fields. (For Cool Edit 96, there may be a simple checkbox in the file save dialog as well.)
Cool Edit can be found at http://www.syntrillium.com/. A similar product called "GoldWave" can be found at http://www.goldwave.com/. A fancy commercial product called Sound Forge is described on http://www.sfoundry.com/.
Don't forget that CD audio is 16-bit stereo 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.
See section (3-3) for some tips on avoiding clicks when committing the audio to CD.
For those of you wondering what the deal with pre-whatever is, this little tidbit is courtesy mikrichter@interramp.com:
"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."
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; Jeff Arnold's DAO software is recommended for this on the PC.
One issue you need to be aware of is that some 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're interested in mastering production audio CDs, you should take a look at http://www.sadie.com/.
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 CDROM drives are (supposed to) start with the last session, so it all works out.
What happens when you try to play one of these as audio in your CDROM drive? As with most things multisession, it depends on your drive. (The control panel that comes with the Plextor 8Plex 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:frame 00:02:00, the data starts there, and the pregap is adjusted accordingly. This method never gained popularity because some drives started playing at 00:02:00 regardless.
For more information (mainly aimed at Macintosh users), see http://www.musicfan.com/ecd/what.html.
Holding down the 'c' key while booting while cause the Mac to boot from an internal CDROM drive. Alternatively, the "Startup Disk" control panel will allow you to select a CDROM.
For PCs, it's a bit more of a challenge. The BIOS on some machines supports bootable CDs. Phoenix (the BIOS developer) has created the El Torito standard for doing this sort of thing. You can find specifications and a "how to" guide at http://www.ptltd.com/techs/specs.html.
Step-by-step procedures with varying levels of detail can be found here:
CDR Publisher can make bootable CDs for PCs and UNIX. WinOnCD 3.0 and Adaptec Easy CD Creator 3.0 can create bootable CDs for PCs.
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.
You need a capture card to transfer the video to your hard drive. Capturing video will 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.
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 CDROM 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.
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 CD Creator and WinOnCD can convert AVI movies into MPEG and write them to CD in the necessary format. (One warning: CD Creator was picky about the parameters used in the MPEG encoding. You may encounter difficulties unless your MPEG sources match the exact specifications.) John Schlichther's AVI2MPG1 combines standard tools into an easy-to-use program for Win95 and NT; use it with the "-v" flag to make a VideoCD-compatible stream that ECDC will accept (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.
Easy CD Creator 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 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 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 or separately in the DirectX 5.0 download area), but most of the UNIX players won't play the audio. Software MPEG playback is becoming easier as CPUs become more powerful, but it's not yet a standard component of many systems.
VideoCDs can only be read by CDROM drives capable of reading CDROM-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; with ActiveMovie you need to look for and open the ".dat" files in the "mpegav" directory).
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.
"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 all of the error correction data for the sector. Rather than applying the error correction to the sector data, the drive just hands back the entire block, errors and all.
This problem can be avoided by using "cooked" reads and writes. Rather than creating an exact duplicate of the source sector - possibly propagating errors along the way - cooked reads pull off the error- corrected 2048 byte sector, and let the CD-R regenerate all the appropriate error correction and other headers. Ideally SNAPSHOT would be able to do the error correction in software, 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 bear in mind that the error correction included in the data sector is a *second* layer of protection. The CIRC ECC encoding that keeps your audio CDs from popping every time a fingerprint is encountered will also correct most errors on data discs. The error detection and correction information included in data sectors serves to correct further errors, since most data can't tolerate errors the way audio can. (The dropped audio samples are replaced with interpolated data. This wouldn't work very well for data.)
The original version of this quote went on to comment that Plextor and Sony
CDROM 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* CDROM 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 ftp://ftp.cdarchive.com/pub/jarnold/readme.zip.
The final answer to this question is, you can safely make copies of copies, so long as the disc is a MODE-1 CDROM 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.
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.
http://www.pgp.com/ has some good encryption software, but none of it works transparently.
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 doesn't have pricing, which suggests that it's expensive.
Of course, it's not really necessary to use special software. Most CD creation programs will allow you to copy arbitrary files onto CDROM, and by using the Joliet standard you can preserve long Win95 filenames. The only disadvantage is that all files are marked as read-only (required by the ISO-9660 spec), so write permission must be re-enabled by hand.
(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 without the
option that turns off write permission on everything and avoid the problem
entirely.)
[autorun] open=filename.exe icon=someicon.icoWhen the CD is placed into a drive with auto-insert notification enabled, it will be shown with the specified icon, and the program named will be launched. (If you turned auto-insert notification off while burning the disc, you may need to reboot before the feature is re-enabled.)
[autorun] 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.hlpTaking it line by line, this says:
For more information:
http://www.microsoft.com/devonly/tech/dx3doc/dire1237.htm
http://www.gui.com.au/avdf/oct95/samp_autoplay.html
A program that will allow you to test autoplay without burning a CD:
http://www.connect.net/gstrope/autotest.htm
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's a utility called "treediff", available from the Simtel archives (http://www.simtel.com/archive/index.htm), that may also be helpful.
"To backup CD+G discs, you must have one of the following recorders... These are the only recorders that will write the CD+G subcodes.
CREATIVE CDR4210 * PANASONIC CW-7501 * PLASMON CDR4240 * SONY CDW-900E YAMAHA All Models * = Records CD+G at 1x speed onlyThe Yamaha CDR200 and CDR400 are the only recorders capable of reading as well as writing CD+G discs. If you do not have one of these models, then you must also have another CDROM device that can read CD+G discs. The following CDROM drives can read CD+G discs...
PLEXTOR 4Plex Plus PLEXTOR 8Plex PLEXTOR 12Plex PLEXTOR 12/20Plex SONY 76S (not recommended)"There may be other units that work as readers or writers. Check the documentation from the manufacturer to be sure.
If you want to duplicate a CDROM, you should either use a program meant for the purpose (Adaptec's CD Copier, Jeff Arnold's SNAPSHOT, 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 you should check the capabilities of the software before making a purchase.
Do a web search on "CD duplication" and "CD replication", or check out http://www.cd-webstore.com/BurningIssues.html (a subscription-based website published by The CD-Info Company, Inc.).
Other programs, like ECDC, are easier to use but less flexible. It isn't necessary to use disc-at-once recording, but it may help.
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FAQ Copyright 1997 Andy McFadden
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