[NBLUG/talk] CD-Burning Frontends

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 10:22:48AM -0800, Andru Luvisi wrote:
> I prefer to make a disk image and then burn it:

Good policy for anything important, I'd agree.

And back in 1998 when I was doing a lot of CD mastering, that's exactly what
I'd do.  And even with the machine being idle, sometimes there'd be a buffer
underrun and there'd be a shiny gold coaster.

however:

>   1. I'm superstitious.  I think it's bad luck to have your computer
>      doing anything more than it needs to be doing while you are
>      burning.  This is not as much of an issue now as it was when I
>      cut my first CD and was always afraid of making a "coaster".
>      Now the computers are faster and CD blanks are cheaper.

The other part of "not as much of an issue" is that:

a) any CD burner worth actually purchasing for actual money has a buffer
built-in.  Back in the "bad old days", you had to pay extra to get a drive
with a 1MB buffer.  These days they all have them, and more like 2-4MB.  You
don't get a coaster until the buffer is empty.  (just checked with cdrecord
-prcap; my work machine has 2048KB of buffer.  I think my home box is about
the same, but I can't get to it to check at the moment)

b) machines are *way* faster than they used to be.

c) a lot of newer drives have "burnproof" or something similar (my home box
does, I think, work machine doesn't).  This technology simply stops the
laser if the buffer on the drive gets too low, and then starts it up again
when the buffer is full again.  Then even on a *really slow* machine that's
*really busy*, you can't make a coaster; you just end up getting a
stop-and-start thing that goes slower.

d) CD-Rs are *cheap*.  It's not a big deal to make a coaster.  CD-RWs avoid
the coaster problem, too -- just toss in a blank= and it's like starting
from scratch.

>   2. I like being able to do a loopback mount before I burn to make
>      certain mkisofs did *exactly* what I wanted it to.

CDs are cheap.

>   3. I like being able to:
>        cmp blah.iso <(dd if=/dev/sr0)
>      to make certain that everything got burned correctly.

But, then, can you be sure that mkisofs did everything correctly?  A
directory diff off the burned media checks *both* things.

(and, once again, CDs are cheap, and the odds of wasting time burning a
coaster are fairly low when not doing really weird stuff.)

I'd certainly go with the ISO->HD, HD->cd-r route for anything where I was
going to do the same thing repeatedly or where the data is really essential.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & President Pro Tempore for Life
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244
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