Cd-revolution!
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday April 28, 1997
Producing a CD-ROM is no longer a job only for multimedia professionals and multinational corporations. DAVID FLYNN shows you how.
CD-ROM recorders are shaping up as the most surprising new consumer product of the year because they are suddenly affordable. Think about it. They give you the ability to store your computer data onto CD-Roms, letting you create what are, in essence, gigantic floppy disks that carry 650 megabytes of data.
And the omnipresence of fast CD-ROM frives on all new PCs makes CD-ROMs a natural medium. If you're a business, they can be ideal for a short-run distribution of stock or customer databases and training materials.
Mulitmedia authors can rely on CD recording or CD-R to churn out customised sales presentations and interactive catalogues. PR firms can dispatch disks containing a bevy of media information, clips from TV commercials saved as AVI files plus dozens of product photographs in TIF format. Software developers could strike limited issues of beta software.
CD-R can also be used for archiving conventional data files and images (replacing microfilm and microfiche for record-keeping) plus long-life off-site backup for corporate and financial databases, and shifting large amounts of data between different machines or sites, such as mirroring a basic Windows installation.
Advances in recording and lower cost of blank media - less than $15 for a whopping 650Mb - increase appeal for CD-R as a slow-growing archive disc or regular backups of new files.
CD-R drives cook discs in many flavours. CD-ROM/XA (Extended Architecture) and the updated CD Plus (also known as CD Extra or Enhanced CD) provide for a mix of data and audio on one disc.
Multi-session recording lets you add data to a disc in successive recording sessions until the CD is full, compared with the older method in which you could write only once, regardless of how much blank space remained. Multi-session is also known as PhotoCD; it was championed by Kodak for saving roll after roll of snapshots onto a single CD "album". More recently the Compact Disc Universal Data Format (CD-UDF) introduced the technology of packet writing, which lets the CD be treated like any other drive. No longer must you launch specialised CD-R software and waste space in linking separate recording sessions. With CD-UDF you can drag and drop files from a hard drive to a blank CD within the Windows 95 Explorer or even save them directly to the CD from any application.
Shopper's guide to CD-R
Most CD-R units come as part of a kit including the CD-R drive, SCSI adaptor card plus a variety of mastering software and accessories. Prices have never been better. Two years ago you'd pay as much for a CD-R drive as for a desktop PC, around the $2,500 mark. The CD-R drive circa 1997 is closer to the ticket of a laser printer: $699 buys you Australia's cheapest CD-R drive, the Smart & Friendly CDR-2006. At last, CD-R is as affordable as it is desirable. CD-R drives can write data at 2x or 4x speeds with read-only rates at an acceptable 4x or 6x. Check the size of the built-in memory buffer that smoothly feeds data onto the disc - 512Kb is the minimum and, as with all things RAM, the more the merrier.
If your kit doesn't come with an SCSI adaptor, set aside an extra $150 and $350 for the card.
The bundled software is largely responsible for making CD-R easy and indeed enjoyable. The most common packages are Adaptec's Easy CD Pro and CD Creator (in some guises this appears under the imprint of former owner Corel). Despite their multisession capabilities, these "premastering" programs are generally used to burn a full disc at a single sitting. This is the preferred route for presentations, beta software, databases and other content intended for mass distribution.
Packet recording adds files incrementally using CD-UDF, an approach favoured for on-going archival and backup. The caveat is that Windows 95 cannot recognise a packetrecorded CD, even to read data on a standard CD-ROM drive (new CD-R drivers are planned for Windows 9x, aka Memphis, due later this year). To facilitate this, Sony developed the CD Recordable File System or CDRFS compatible with Windows 95. The CDRFS driver is written onto each packet recorded disc so it can be read on any Windows 95 system. Discs destined for Windows 3.1 and Macintosh machines should be premastered using the platformindependent ISO-9660 standard. The blank discs used for CD-R are not the same read-only CDs seen in the shops. Recordable discs usually have a thin gold coating, although in budget blanks this is coated by a green dye. Prices range from $10 to $15.
It's feasible to use CD-R discs for a short "write on demand" production run but for large-scale distribution a gold "master" is best sent to a duplication plant and stamped onto the thinner and less expensive CD-ROM platters (about $1.50 per disc in quantities of several thousand).
The foundation for all of this must be a high-performance PC: ideally a fast Pentium with 32Mb of RAM and plenty of hard disk space, or an external storage device such as a Jaz or SyJet drive, for storing the files to be copied to the CD.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
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