The possible usage for the Falcon computers is constantly improving; now you can burn at home with these great machines. The program CDRecorder from Bernd Lohrum in Germany is the miracle that makes dreams come true.

When I saw CDRecorder in SoundPool's new catalogue, I thought "Now it's time!", so I bought a Philips CDD2000 CD-recorder, a tenpack of CDR's and the above mentioned program.
After a couple of mistakes (you only get one chance per CDR!) I managed, with the excellent support from SoundPool and a little reading in the user's manual, to find out how to do. Among other things, I learned that the reading of the harddisk can't keep up with 300kB/S - or even 150kB/s when going down into several subfolders. Then you have to make an "Image" of the data that will be written to the CD, and then you need a harddisk with enough room to store this image-file...

According to the thin, but informative manual, you need MagiC if you want to run larger partitions than 512MB. On a CDR you can store about 700MB, so I had to keep to the 512MB when testing, since I didn't have MagiC. I was lucky to find that my programs and datafiles didn't need more than the 512MB, so now I have a useable backup of my stuff on a CD!

Let's burn a CD-ROM!
To start with, you have to set the Bus-arbitration to unit #7 with a program that's supplied on the disk (this is only made once and written into NVRAM). Then you start CDRecorder. In "Einstellungen" you choose the correct CD-writer and make a couple of other settings. Then you go to the main window and double-click on the ISO9660-icon. A fileselector appears and you choose where to get the files. If you want to use data from several different folders or partitions, you just double-click on the ISO9660-icon again and repeat the procedure. Then it's all done! Press the Record-button and go take a cup of coffee. Now all the selected files are copied to an image-file and when it's done, the image is written to the CD and you have a brand new CD-ROM!
To burn a CD is a rather quick procedure. I transfered 421MB to the CD and it took about 25 minutes (transfer rate was 300MB/s).

In short, it's a user-friendly program with a manual that describes exactly what's needed and nothing more.
CDRecorder Pro (writes both audio and data) costs SEK2495:- and CDRecorder Audio (writes only audio) costs SEK1295:- at Mr Data in Malmo.

CD-writers that are supported by CDRecorder 1.x: JVC XR-W2001 Kodak PCD225 Philips CDD521, 522 and 2000 Plasmon RF4100 Ricoh RS9200CD Yamaha CDR100 and 102

I didn't have the space to go into burning audio CD's in this issue, but I hope to be able to come back to this in the next. Don't miss the exciting follow-up!

Claes
claes@holmerup.com
www.holmerup.com