Subject: Re: CDR's & MP3 for GS???
From: Mike McGovern <mcgovern@nospam.frii.com>
Date: Wed, Jan 6, 1999 15G23 
Message-id: <3693E257.9001C886@nospam.frii.com>



Randy Shackelford wrote:

> Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
>
> :>I had to get one because APS was hopelessly out of stock on
plain recorders
> :>when I got mine. The rewritable part has avoided making some
coasters, but
> :>since none of my CD drives can read RW discs, it hasn't been
worth a whole
> :>lot. But like I say, you write to 'em in exactly the same way.
>
> : Well, I saw one demonstrated.  It was the HP external model that
> : connects to a Windows PC via an EPP parallel port.  The
> : salesman dragged a file onto the CD-RW icon, the HP drive
> : lit up, after a bit the CD-RW drive stopped spinning.  He
> : double clicked on the CD-RW icon and the file was sitting in
> : the window.
>
> : Looks like the same procedure as hard drive or floppy drive
> : reading/writing to me.
>
> : Maybe it is a Windows or HP specific CD format that Macs
> : don't have.  The HP drive WAS compliant with MULTIPLE
> : standards (all kinds of colored "books" or something).
>
> You can do the same thing with plain recordables, it just puts the
data in
> a new session each time. Each session on an HFS CD shows up as a
separate
> volume, which can cause your desktop to get cluttered.
> --

There are 2 ways to write to a CDR/W, regular "burning" (Toast, Easy
CD Creator)
and packet writing (Direct CD).

With burning, there isn't any difference between CDR and CDRW media,
except
that you can erase the CDRW and start over.  It is true that making
a
multisession
HFS disc results in multiple icons, but a multisession ISO 9660 disc
just has one
icon.

With packet writing, the CDR/W is treated like a large floppy disk. 
Files can be

dropped onto the CD icon, or saved directly from an application. 
When using CDR
media it is not possible to reclaim any space (files CAN be deleted,
but the
space isn't
freed).  Early versions of Direct CD on the PC, and all versions for
the Mac
treat
CDRW media the same as CDR media.  Newer versions of Direct CD for
the PC can
reuse the space from deleted files.  Direct CD uses a disk format
called UDF.  In
order
to read the disc, a UDF driver is necessary.  In order for CDROM
drives to read a

CDRW disc, they must support a feature called Multiread (regardless
of whether
the
disc was burned or packet written).  The concept of sessions doesn't
really apply
to
packet writing, and there is always just one icon.

Mike