[svlug] cd burner

[Bill Jonas]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 12:53:49PM -0700, Felipe Leme wrote:
> - For IDE, if the CD burner is IDE/ATAPI compliant (it should be), it 
> will work on Linux.

I'd like to point out that that's not quite always the case.  There's a
list of supported burners which someone else has kindly posted already,
or you can check the documentation in the latest source of cdrecord.

That said, a burner *will* function as merely a CD-ROM *reader* if it's
ATAPI compliant but unsupported by cdrecord or
$FAVORITE_BURNING_PROGRAM.  But that kind of defeats the purpose of
getting a CD-R(W), right? :)

In any case, I bought a Philips PCRW404K about a year ago and it's
worked just fine for me.  I didn't check the compatibility lists before
I bought it because it was basically a spur-of-the-moment decision (and
it was open-box, which carries with it a much more liberal return policy
(at Circuit City), so I could return it with no restocking fee).  It's a
4x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW drive; it's not the fastest out there, but it was
only $100 a year ago. ;)  Anyway, it worked just fine after I carefully
followed the instructions in the CD-Burning-HOWTO.  (Word to the wise:
read the whole thing all the way through before you start doing
configuration; it might save you an extra kernel build.)

One thing to consider if you want to burn your own music CDs is whether
or not cdrdao supports the drive.  cdrdao is a program to burn a CD in
DAO (disc-at-once) mode, which eliminates the two-second gaps in between
tracks that you get if you burn it with cdrecord (which only does
track-at-once, or TAO).  With mine, I had to specify the driver to use
on the command line since my drive wasn't recognized by cdrdao.  I sent
mail to the maintainer letting him know about my drive and which driver
it uses, but I don't know if it's been included in the latest versions
or not; I've only recorded audio CDs once or twice, and it was a while
ago.

HTH.

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill at billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,  we should
be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and
this we should do freely and generously."          -- Benjamin Franklin