source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 16:10:10 -0700 Subject: Diary of a CD-R Novice From: John Starrett Ladies and Gentlemen- I have been away from the computer for a few days due to the wedding of a son and a promise to a wife to paint the house. Yesterday I got back to work and set out to resolve a problem that consumed about 3 hours of time since I first hooked up the CD-Recordable and the to the Adaptec SCSI card---my Gateway 2000 computer could not find the SCSI device. Thursday-after 4 hours of trying every combination of available IRQ and base address, screaming at the computer, Adaptec and Gateway technicians, we determine that the problem is in the advanced BIOS of the Gateway machine-it is set to plug & play and assigns IRQs as it sees fit. I reset the BIOS to user setup and the SCSI drive is recognized! (I am not a genuine computer geek--I just use the computer for scienfic number crunching and visual simulations, so if you must call me on my poor use of DOS and hardware terminology, please do so in a gentle fashion). I am finally ready to record. I have three CD-R software packages-Correl, EZ CD-R and one that came with the CD-R player. I try the EZ CD-R software first. A CD-R can be recorded over several sessions, which is a good thing, as standard CD audio takes about 10 megabytes per minute and a hard disk would be quite full from an hour of music. After each session, a box is clicked to close the session. When the disk has all the material recorded (data, programs, music, images or multimedia) you click the close disk box and the CD-R can finally be read. I have several disks with test data that have not yet been closed, so in the interest of economy, I first try recording DOS from my hard drive to the disk. It takes about ten seconds to put DOS in the appropriate format and about three minutes to burn it on the disk. I close the disk (about one minute) and I have my first CD ROM. I test it, and it works! The machine reads DOS from the CD-R! Now for music. Each of the three software packages has a test feature that simulates writing a disk by doing everything but turning on the laser. As I don't have a whole disk worth of material to record, and special preparation is required to mix sound and other sources, I cannot use one of the partially recorded test discs. To avoid wasting a new disc, I decide to test write some wave files. I take several Monty Python sound bytes, sing a few bars into WINDAT (it came with my $50 sound card) and make a cue sheet. Piece of cake. It takes about five minutes. Just drag and drop WAVE files into the CD-R icon. I test record, and it is a success! Except for the 7 wasted hours trying to determine why the machine couldn't locate the SCSI device (ain't DOS machines grand?), running the CD-R has been a breeze. Each of the three pieces of software is easy and intuitive to use, and there were no glitches recording a real DOS CD and the test sound CD. All that remains is to do a real sound session, which I will report on next time. By the way, Sony now is pricing a fully functional CD-R drive at $600. John Starrett Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 29 Jun 1996 04:20 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id TAA10372; Fri, 28 Jun 1996 19:20:41 -0700 Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 19:20:41 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu