CompuServe Thread

Britt, Yes, use an Audio Visual drive and write your data to an image file before writing it to the recorder. If you do this, you should have practically a 100% success rate. This is not always necessary, but if your main concern is the cost and not time, this method will save your discs! Steve Styerwalt OMI

The drive can't wait "for a few spins" while recording for a variety of reasons, but there is hope. The problem can be solved entirely in software without exposing customers to these issues. My company makes a product called Spira that provides drive letter access to a CD-R drive from any Windows application. You never have to worry about file fragmentation or access speed. All these issues are dealt with at the Windows device driver level, rather than in an application. Check out our latest press release in the CD-Recordable library section of this forum. David Multer Moniker, Inc.

Britt, this is a difficult question but i try to answer it. Not all information here will be absolutely accurate but this is not because i do not want to tell you it's simply because i do not know better. Now the top ten list why CD-Recorders cannot link write commands: 10. To help CD-WO media manufacturers double their income 9. Otherwise nobody would buy those expensive A/V drives 8. To get some suspense in the process of cutting disks 7. Because the standard (Orange Book) says so 6. To make software producers like me work out solutions to that problem 5. because it has always been so 4. to give me the opportunity of competing with D.L. 3. to trouble some CD pressing plants 2. It's getting hard finding additional reasons But the top ten reason why CD Recorders cannot link write commands is: the CIRC encoder which will devide the content of one CD sector into blocks and interleve these blocks with blocks from two other sectors. In order to record one sector you have to write three sectors to have all information flushed to disc. Peter

Dear Britt, The problem you are stating is the most basic problem of Track-at-Once writing — you have to write a whole track in one smooth pass, any interruptions are fatal. One solution would be packet writing, where you write your data in much smaller chunks, smaller than the CD recorder's buffer even, so you _can't_ suffer a buffer underrun. The problem is that no existing CD-ROM drive can read a disc written in packets. The ECMA 168 standard has been proposed as a way to stretch the ISO standard to deal with this, but it would require CD-ROM manufacturers to support it by hardware changes, and no one is jumping up to volunteer (many of them are only just now waking up to the fact that their drives need to be able to read recordable discs!). ECMA also doesn't address the needs of the installed base of 50 million "dumb" CD-ROM drives. Incat has applied for a patent on a whole new approach which would support packet writing, while maintaining full backward compatibility with ISO and existing hardware. It's called FlexCD, and there's a press release about it in our library (GO INCATS). FlexCD was announced (and received enthusiastically) at the February meeting of the Optical Storage Technology Association. BTW, it will be licensed to whoever wants it, including our competitors. Best, Deirdre' Straughan Incat Systems