CD-R

The Compact Disc is often taken for granted. It can hold over an hour of music at exceptional quality or 650 megabytes of data, and it will never go bad like a cassette or floppy disc. Every computer has been equipped with a CD-ROM drive standard for many years, allowing CDs to become very common in a computer room. However, Compact Discs have always been much harder to create than a floppy disc or a cassette, until recently.

The invention of the CD Writer makes this possible. They use a special disc that can be recorded onto, called a CD-R, for Compact Disc-Recordable. The writer burns a small pit into the disc using a special laser. Just about every audio CD player and CD-ROM reader can read these disks. This allows the average user to start creating their own Compact Discs, which is truly amazing.

Compact Disc Recorders allow users to make their own CD-ROMs and audio CDs. You cannot write to a CD by simply dragging a file onto it in the Finder like you would a floppy disc or hard drive. A CD burning program is used instead, with Adaptec’s Toast being the most popular. This can create discs of any format. Jam, by the same company, specializes in the creation of audio CDs.

Toast will burn a CD with ease. You have to select which files you want on the CD and, with a click of a button, the burning process begins. Toast will make sure the writing process will be a success and will proceed to burn the CD. This process can take awhile, depending on the speed of the writer. Usually it takes about 20 minutes to burn one full CD.

Jam, closely related to Toast, specializes in music CDs. You select which sound files will be on the CD, much as you would select files in Toast. You can change their play order, the volume levels on each track, and perform fades between tracks. This creates CDs in true Red Book Standard format, making perfectly legitimate audio CDs.

The downside of CD burners is their need for perfection. It is inevitable that mistakes will be made, either by forgetting to add a file or a power failure, ruining the current CD. Buying blank CDs in bulk makes wasted CDs easier to deal with, since they become pretty cheap.

Rewriteable CDs are truly fantastic. The metal used to burn is able to be melted again and written over. However, these discs are more costly and cannot be read in most audio CD players. Being able to erase what you have done in the past is a great feature if you do make a mistake. Some people use a Rewriteable CD as a test for other CDs to make sure there are no mistakes. Once it is perfect, a CD-R is used, being more compatible, now under the assurance that it is perfect.

Both CD types can be written in multiple sessions. The only limitation is that the burner must be able to support multi-session writing. It uses 13 megabytes of extra space to write each session, but it allows you to use a CD over time or create a CD Plus.

With a CD Plus, you first write the music as a session, and then write any data files. The CD can be played in a stereo, and then seen on a computer as a typical CD-ROM. This is often used when the audio portion of a CD does not fill the CD, leaving extra room for data. Companies will often sell CD Pluses with pictures of the band, QuickTime movies, and any other information that they can fit onto the disc.

Compact Discs are great sources of music and information. Data can be stored on a single disc that would otherwise require hundreds of floppies or take up a lot of room on a hard drive. The technology is now affordable enough so that everyone can start producing their own personalized CDs, filled with perhaps backup data, or maybe a collection of favorite songs. Anything is possible. Compact Discs are wonderful media formats for listening to music and storing data.

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Brian Koponen
briankop@idt.net