source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 17:17:09 -0700 Subject: Diary of a CD-R Novice From: John Starrett Ladies and Gentlemen- This begins a series of short posts on the trials and tribulations of a physicist-musician-inventor learning to use CD recordable technology. CD-R allows you to record your own CDs on a desktop unit onto $6 discs. The recorders are currently available for approximately $700 (in a couple of months all of the big names--Sony, Phillips,... will be available for under $700). First let me clear up a couple of mistakes from my last post (I'm a novice, so I get to make a few). I stated that my expert source (a CD professional) said to avoid JVC units. He did not say that they were no good, simply that in his opinion Sony seemed sturdier. Further, I stated that CD-R had a conservative lifespan of 10 years, and that standard CDs outlasted this. My other expert source strenuously disagrees, stating that CD-R will outlast standard CD media, as the aluminum is subject to oxidation from oxygen dissolved in the polycarbonate, while the gold reflective surfaces of CD-R discs is not. Further, she states, unless the CD-R disc is exposed to extremely bright light (much brighter than sunlight) for long periods, say days or weeks, the information will not likely degrade. Last night I installed the SCSI board and CDR unit in my machine, a Gateway 2000 75MHz Pentium, and fired it up. The system could not locate the CD-R drive, and the software supplied with the SCSI board had a faulty #2 disk, so I couldn't run the diagnostic. Well, that's what you get for using a DOS system. I will try to download some new software from the net and get this thing up and running so I will have something a little more heartening to relate next post. On a more upbeat note, Denver's Microstock festival is being organized for the 19th of October, and we are presenting a day of lectures and demonstrations on the 18th at the University of Colorado at Denver on the Science of Sound and Music in conjunction with the festival. Any microtonalists who will be in Denver October the 18th are urged to contact me if they wish to present a 25 minute talk or demo. John Starrett Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 15:06 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id GAA10830; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 06:05:48 -0700 Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 06:05:48 -0700 Message-Id: <960618130235_71670.2576_HHB54-10@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu