John Galea's CD Recording Page

Last updated 9/22/97.

Introduction

What I am going to try to do is to give an introduction to mastering your own CDROMs using a CD-R (CDrom Recorder). I have been at this only a short while, so I am by no means an expert.

Hopefully my suggestions can help you to learn a little and save some of the errors I made.

Suggested Requirements

While these are not hard and fast I recommend the following:

Your Choices

There are a number of CD-Rs on the market today. I looked into numerous before purchasing mine. The Creative looks good. I am quite a Creative fan, and they have chosen to bundle an Adaptec SCSI card and excellent software. The SCSI card is however ISA rather than PCI, a bit of a disappointment.

HP seems to hold the market for parallel port attached drives. This gives you the option of moving the CD-R to different machines. While this may sound like a valuable choice, the amount of free space required to master CD-Rs makes this a little limited.

Adaptec Easy CD-Pro

This is the software that came with my HP 6020EP. The code is well done and very reliable. There have been no crashes of the code. However there is one MAJOR short coming of this code. For some reason the designers chose to not have a post write verify. This is a real flaw. Since starting to write CDs I have noticed that for some reason files simply get dropped as well as errors in writing. Without a post write verification you have no idea the error occurred. The code informed the write occurred successfully. What it really meant is that the CD-Recorder returned no error messages. Quite different from verifying the data written. The program hints at using the CD-R as a backup media. Well if you do not verify what is written, this is not much of a backup media.

Anyone who has used tape backup knows verify after writing is a MUST! Yo Adaptec ... what were you thinking. I have not checked other code yet to see if this flaw is common.

MAJOR WARNING

NEVER, never, never, never assume that CD-Rs are perfect. DO NOT ERASE data used to master a CDROM until you have verified the CDROM recorded correctly. I mean the data is read back and compared against the original data. At the very least confirm all files are there. As I mentioned above I had files simply not be written for some magical unknown reason.

Publisher

Adaptec Easy CD Pro has a field called publisher. If the CDROM you are mastering is not legal, be sure to blank this field. Although I am sure no one illegally copies CDROMs right ...

Pre-write Verify

Easy CD Pro has a Pre write verify test. What this does is tests the speed (basically the transfer rate, hard drive speed and fragmentation of the hard drive) off of your hard drive in comparison to the requirements of the CD-R. If you have run this once and it passed, and you defragment your hard drive regularly this test is not necessary and takes as long as writing to the CD-R.

Write on the fly

You can select to buffer your writes on your hard drive. What this does is basically create the image on your hard drive prior to writing the CDROM. This will require a lot of hard drive space.

The infamous Virtual CD Error

Numerous times I ran into an error message from Easy CD Pro ... Virtual CD error. Whenever I got this error message the only way I found to get around it was to have even more hard drive space for the program to work.
Update ... seems one other thing can cause Virtual CD errors. Trying to write more than 650MB. And Easy CD-Pro wait to the very end when it starts to perform the write to inform you with this wonderful error message.

New name for Easy CD Pro

I think the name for Easy CD Pro is a little misleading. Easy ... nope quite complicated. Sure if everything goes well it might be easy, but in my experience this is more the exception than the rule.

I certainly would not call it Pro. Without after write verification and some of the other features of the code I think I would more readily call it amateur than Pro.

One last Easy CD Pro feature

With a parallel port CD-R you might think heh, I can master the image on one machine while I burn a CD on another ... well once again you would be wrong. Easy CD Pro will not let you create an image file unless the CD-R is attached to the machine. Probably a license thing. Oh well ....

Do I like Easy CD Pro

With all the comments I have documented above you would think I hate this code. Well I am not impressed. It is not the best thing I have ever touched. However, it is also not the worst. Stability is excellent, and to date I have not had any bad CD burns ... just dropped files. I look forward to trying the two other programs Corel CD Creator and GEAR. I used GEAR two years ago with a Pinnacle 1X. It really seemed quite good.

The number one rule in creating CDROMs is ...

When writing to the CDROM, LEAVE YOUR SYSTEM ALONE. Do nothing else, do not move the mouse, do not open other applications ... NADA. Face it Win95 is really not a multi tasking operating system. Mastering a CDROM takes a lot of CPU horsepower, a lot of bus throughput and very tight timing. Doing anything risks interrupting the process.

Remember anytime the program crashes, the system crashes, the CD writing is interrupted, the power goes out, or any other interruption to the CD recording process, the CDROM you are recording is ruined. All you have left is an interesting drink coaster. Albeit an expensive one. So leave your system alone. Do nothing. I can not stress this enough.
Update ... do not forget to turn off your screen saver. A busy screen saver can interrupt a CD burn and it is once again ... coaster time.

What is the recommended method to master data to a CDROM

While there are other ways, this is what I recommend. Gather the data on a hard drive, ZIP drive, Jazz drive, or where ever. Remember a CDROM will hold 650 MB of data. That does not mean 650MB hard drive space, but 650MB of raw data. Hard drives suffer from cluster size inefficiencies meaning it may take 20-30% more space on the hard drive. Once the data is collected and ready to create a CDROM I recommend you take the contents and create an ISO master file prior to creating the CDROM. This will require the same amount of space as the data you are trying to master. While this may seem like an extra step the benefits are the following: Once you have created the ISO master create the CDROM from the master created on your fast hard drive. Then compare the written CDROM against the master. Also I would compare the original data against that which is on the CDROM. I have become quite the doubting Thomas when it comes to CDROM recording. While I have not lost a lot of data, I have lost some ...

Copying a CDROM

If you are trying to copy a CDROM, I still recommend you take the contents of the CDROM and master it to an ISO file as documented above. Trying to master directly from CDROM may work, but why risk it. Simply create an ISO master file on your hard drive and master the CDROM from that. As a test I used the pre-write verify to copy directly from a 6x IDE CDROM. The test failed stating it was not fast enough. EZCDPRO allows you to select between writing at 1x and 2x. At 1x the test passes, but the time this would take would be long and there would be no ability to verify the write. So once again I recommend you create a master image of the CDROM you want to copy.

Copying a CDROM may take more hard drive space than you think! I started with 1 GB free on my drive. Took a CDROM with 630 MB of data. You would have thought I had lots of space ... well you would have been wrong. EZCDPRO announced as it was creating the images that it was fixing up what seemed like every file. I have no idea what this was actually doing, but it required greater than the 1GB I had available. I believe it too 2x or 1.3 GB to complete.
Update ... with a SCSI CDROM CD-copy works quite well as long as both the CD-R and the CD you are reading from are connected to a SCSI controller. I mean a real one not the parallel port SCSI controller that comes with the HP 6020EP. Of course as mentioned above, you will not be able to verify the write occurred, so in HP we trust.

Multi-Session

In CD-Rs multi session means you can add more data to a CDROM later. While this may sound good there is a catch. Any of you who know me know there is always a catch. Nothing is without its subtle problems. Each time you open a session to the CD-R it takes 24MB of header/footer data. So adding 1MB actually consumes 25MB. So you really want to put as much onto the CDROM at once as possible.

Buy Bundled SCSI/CD-R

I have heard a lot of compatibility problems between SCSI cards and CD-Rs. CD-Rs are very time sensitive. There are lots of SCSI implementations, but not all are good. I would strongly suggest you buy a bundled SCSI and CD-R. That way you have only one person to argue with if it is not working well.

Corel/Adaptec CD Creator and the HP6020ep

I tried to load this code, however it does not recognize the parallel port attached CD-R. Oh well ...

Audio CDs

Update ... Ok us start by level setting. Copying an audio CD is NOTHING like copying a data CD. This is a fine place to start. First of all realize that not all CDROMs allow you to read audio tracks off of the CDROM. In fact, those that do, the most common speed for reading the audio tracks is 1x. This includes the faster 12X drives. This implies that doing CD-CD copy is in general not possible at the 2X for example that the HP 6020 supports. Before trying a CD-CD audio copy be sure to perform the test. I did not and it cost me a coaster ... Ahhh my collection of coasters continues to grow!

One option to create your own audio CDs is to copy the tracks from the CDROM (or CDROMs if from more than one) to wav files on your hard drive. This will take a lot of space. Roughly 10MB per minute. Additonally you will need code that will perform this CDDA copy (this stands for CD digital audio). Easy CD-Pro can do this using the CD-Deck, however it has the feature of only being able to do one at a time. The HP 6020 can only read data off at 1X, so patience helps. Other programs will also to this CDDA copying. Once the wave files are on the hard drive you can easily then create the audio CD.

A warning ... the sound recorder that is part of Win95 opens the entire wave file prior to starting to play it, so opening a 5 minute song (which would be roughly 50MB) is not a sane thing to do. Yup I tried it ... It actually does start, but extreme pateience are required.
Homepage


Email me