http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1507/pcmg0043.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
PC Magazine -- April 9, 1996
Jim Seymour
Once the province of CD-ROM professionals, the process of making your own CDs is going mainstream. We show you the hardware and software that makes it all come together.
The march of technologies and their tools from the fringes of the personal computer universe to the mainstream is one of the great stories of the PC business. Evolving from big, difficult, and expensive undertakings requiring highly trained specialists to small, easy, and affordable tasks you and I can handle as a matter of routine, one computing job after another has come in out of the cold and onto our desktops.
It's happening again, this time with roll-your-own CD-ROMs, or CD-R (compact disk-recordable) technology. When Yamaha and Sony introduced the first CD recorders a few years ago, they weren't desktop tools, they were the size of desks. Even a year ago, after they'd shrunk to the size of a typical PC system box, CD-R drives were still expensive beasts ($3,000 to $7,500) using expensive media ($30 for a blank disk)--which they trashed with depressing regularity.
Today, for less than $1,000, you can buy a high-quality CD-R drive that fits in a half-height drive bay inside your PC. You can buy name-brand disks for $7 or less. And you'll find software bundled with that drive that makes producing CD-ROMs quick and easy. You may trash a few disks at first, but before long "burning" your own CD-ROM disk (in CD-R lingo) will become routine.
That said, there are a few tricks to be learned in producing your own CD-ROMs, and the first one is to buy the right drive and software. Accordingly, we've divided this look at the business of making your own CD-ROMs into three areas: the CD-R drives themselves, the premastering software that actually controls the recording process, and the multimedia "authoring" software some users will need for their elaborate CD productions.
About 165,000 CD-R drives were sold worldwide in 1995; that figure will grow threefold to half a million drives this year. Why are CD-Rs so hot? It's because of economy, capacity, and standardization. No other widely readable PC data-storage medium compares with the economy of CD-R disks: about a penny a megabyte. (Only digital audio tapes come close, but they are hardly in universal use.)
With 650MB of storage space, CD-ROMs are also big enough to handle backups of most hard disks to just one or two disks--or to distribute a database of literally millions of records economically. Ask anyone who uses one of the CD directories that pack nearly all of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the U.S. onto just three to five disks.
Finally, CD-ROMs are certainly the most universal form of economical, high-density data storage in the world. With about 75 million CD-ROM drives installed on computers around the world--a figure likely to be more than doubled by the end of 1997, according to Jim Porter, editor of the Disk/Trend report--it's possible to send a CD-R disk created on your desk nearly anywhere with a high degree of confidence that it can be used without problems.
Though CD-Rs are a lot of fun for home PC users, who can create compilation audio disks of their favorite performers' tracks, they come into their own in a business setting. Beyond conventional uses such as backing up hard disks--making backups, remember, that are immediately usable without any restoring of the data to an old or new hard disk--CD-Rs allow creation of "audit trail" disks that are unalterable, unerasable snapshots of the state of a set of electronic records as of a given date.
CD-R disks are also coming into wide use as publishing media for companies that want to distribute new, electronic versions of huge illustrated catalogs and price lists quickly. Almost overnight, CD-R systems have grabbed a huge share of the service bureau business; graphic design studios and magazine art directors can replace the dozen 44MB SyQuest cartridges they once sent to their service bureaus on a given job or issue with a single CD-R disk.
Archiving is another important use of CD-Rs. Network managers regularly comb through large companies' servers for files--and sometimes programs--that haven't been used for a long time. An HSM (hierarchical storage management) system "grooms" those servers' hard disks, moving inactive files from fast but expensive hard disk storage to slower but far cheaper-per-megabyte "near-online" media such as CD-Rs and DATs. You can easily set up your own archiving system on your desktop with CD-R drives. This is far more convenient than moving older, infrequently used data to slow, linear-access back-up tapes, from which the file or files you need must usually first be restored to a hard disk for practical use. (With a spiral recording path, CD-Rs aren't true random-access media, like hard disks, and they're a lot slower than hard disks, but they're plenty fast for direct use of data you access only occasionally.)
As prices for CD-R mechanisms continue to drop, it's conceivable that PCs aimed at the business user will incorporate CD-R drives in lieu of one-trick-pony CD-ROM drives, since every CD recorder can also read standard CDs. Right now, a typical unit writes at 2X speed but reads at 4X speed (though low-cost units are still only 2X read).
Faster-writing drives are becoming available but may not be worth the price for some time to come, because your batting average in recording disks at 4X or higher speeds may be low (keep reading). We probably won't see CD-Rs that read faster than 4X for some time, because reading-speed performance is weighed down by the unit's heavy recording head.
The drive itself is only half the story. Most CD-R drives come bundled with CD-R premastering software, which lets you arrange and properly format the data to be burned onto a CD. Often, the bundled app is a "lite" version of one of the heavyweight packages reviewed in this issue's story "Create Your Own CD: Mastering Tools."
These scaled-down premastering packages vary widely in terms of ease of use and CD formats supported. The best ones provide intuitive, File Manager-like interfaces for routine tasks such as backup and archiving. Better packages are capable of creating multisession disks, allowing you to add material to the disk incrementally, up to the maximum of 650MB--at the cost of an additional 16MB of overhead space lost with every session after the first. And all are capable of creating both audio CDs (up to 74 minutes per disk) and data disks.
Beyond that, it's not so simple. The world of CD-ROM formats has become confusingly fragmented into a jumble of differing formats. Today you can find not only audio CDs and data CD-ROMs but a bewildering variety of other specialized forms: CD-ROM XA, Photo CD, CD-I (CD-Interactive), Enhanced CD (CD Plus), and more. The lingua franca of the CD-ROM world is the ISO 9660 disk, a data format readable by PCs running DOS or Windows, by Macintoshes running System 6.x or 7.x, and by almost every Unix variant. You're limited to DOS's eight-dot-three filename, but that's a small price to pay for the ISO 9660 format's interoperability among operating systems and hardware platforms. Microsoft's new Joliet CD-ROM formatting standard expands on 9660 by allowing semi-intelligent truncation of long filenames (much as in Windows 95), and it is beginning to be supported by this new generation of CD-R software.
You'll need to learn some new lingo. The most dreaded term is buffer underrun. In burning CD-Rs, you get only one chance: Even the slightest interruption of data flowing from your PC to the CD-R drive will spoil the disk, creating a $7 coaster.
To reduce the chances of an interruption, data flowing to a CD-R drive is captured first in a buffer. As long as that buffer is never fully emptied--picture data from the PC's hard disk being poured into the top of a bit bucket, while data added earlier is being drained off at the bottom to the CD-R--you won't have problems. But even the briefest gap in that data flow--a buffer underrun--and you're headed back to the starting line to buy another $7 ticket. See the accompanying roundup on CD-R drives for details on how frequently (or infrequently) each drive/software combination had us swearing under our breath.
If you're interested in using CD-R for publishing, you'll want to look closely at the economics of producing multiple-copy runs. In general, desktop CD-R production makes sense for up to 12 duplicate disks. It isn't just the $7 cost of blank CD-Rs that limits the size of most desktop runs, but the cost of labor--and, often more important, the delay in completing the job and getting the data out the door. On the one hand, you can crank out a few dozen disks in less time than it takes FedEx to get your CD-R master to a CD-ROM duplicating plant. On the other, one-at-a-time processes don't lend themselves to much speed.
If you decide to go for larger runs, you'll be happy to know that your desktop-produced CD-R will be happily accepted by most CD-ROM stamping plants. However, as in any service-bureau relationship, make sure you understand the supplier's requirements, and--long before you send a disk by overnight courier for a hurry-up job--send a sample master created on your system, for testing. For mass duplication, it's critical that such things as start and stop codes, track numbers, and "post gap" timing be correct.
Similarly, make a realistic assessment of the level of sophistication you want in your CD-Rs--and your own skill and interest level. It's easy to create a PowerPoint 7 presentation on your PC's hard disk, then transfer that show, with accompanying sound and video files, to a CD-R for wider distribution. But as you'll see in our accompanying review of multimedia authoring packages, creating a dazzling true multimedia CD akin to those shrink-wrapped CD-ROMs on store shelves is a world beyond the simple content-creation tools we're used to using (such as word processors or charting and graphics programs).
Today's best multimedia authoring software is much better than the programs we examined two years ago. As a class, these apps now handle video clips and CD-quality audio with aplomb, making the creation of truly interactive apps much easier, and no longer demand a programmer sitting at your elbow for satisfying results. But there's still a learning curve to climb, and none of these packages are suitable for the casual user. Are they right for you? Put another way: do you really want to change your job title to Multimedia Writer/Artist/Designer/ Producer?
Today's CD-R drives are amazing bargains. Later this year we'll see prices fall from today's low of just under $900 to about $500. Beyond that? At the last Fall Comdex, Philips and Ricoh showed prototypes of their new CD-E (compact disk-erasable) products. As the name implies, the disks will be rewritable (and hence reusable), just as floppy disks are today. Philips hopes to ship final units by the fourth quarter of this year. The drives and disks will be backward-compatible with today's CD-ROMs and CD-Rs, and will command a small price premium over their write-once precursors.
The other optical-disk sensation this year is sure to be the DVD (which once stood for digital video disk and then digital versatile disk, but which now has no official long name), agreed on last fall over competing and naturally incompatible technologies advanced by Sony and Toshiba. This year's DVD units will hold 4.7GB of data--enough for a feature-length movie, with MPEG-2 compression applied--and will be able to read existing CD-ROM and CD-R disks. Consequently, a single DVD disk could hold, say, the complete movie The Lion King for home DVD players, as well as Disney's related computer game for PCs, the sound track from the movie, and a complete catalog of Disney products. The DVD specification also allows for double-layered disks with a total capacity of 8.5GB and the potential for double-sided, dual-layer disks with a 17GB capacity. Unfortunately, none of these new disks will play in today's CD-ROM drives, but new DVD drives for PCs may be on the market as early as the end of this year.
Will recordable DVD disks be far behind? There are already plans on the drawing board for so-called DVD-R disks. However, industry experts don't expect the 3.8GB recorders to arrive on the market until the end of 1997 at the earliest, and probably not until 1998.
Our advice: If the convenience and power of quick, easy production of cheap 650MB optical disks that can be read on many millions of PCs across the world appeals to you, dig in. On the pages that follow you'll find everything you need to know to put CD-R tools and technology to work on your desktop today.
Making Your First CD: Six Steps to Success
Creating a CD-ROM from scratch may seem intimidating at first, but by tackling the process a step at a time you'll be churning out shiny platters like a pro.
1. DECIDE what type of CD-ROM application you need to make. A buyers' guide? A presentation or training disk? A product demo? Or simply a data archive? This will help you determine whether you need simple mastering software or a full-blown authoring package.
2. COLLECT or create the various content elements that will be incorporated into the CD--bitmaps, text files, video clips, audio tracks, and so on. Get a clear idea of the logical progression of the elements. For simple data archiving, skip to step 4.
3. BUILD more complex applications, such as training disks and multimedia presentations, in an authoring package (see "Create Your Own CD: Multimedia Authoring Tools"). You'll create an overview of your entire application and build links between screens, objects, and data. Generate a distributable runtime version of your application, and check to make sure all animations and links perform as expected.
4. IMAGE the files you want on the CD using a premastering package (see "Create Your Own CD: Premastering Software"). Some packages place pointers to the files that should be fetched from the hard disk, while others create an actual mirror image of the data bound for the CD. Most CD-R drives include basic premastering software; more serious applications may require you to buy a full-blown package.
5. BURN the disk on a CD-R drive (see "Create Your Own CD: CD-R Drives"). If you are making a runtime (executable) CD app, the data must be written complete in one pass. If a hiccup occurs and the data stream is interrupted, you'll have to chuck that $7 blank CD and try again.
6. DISTRIBUTE your masterpiece. If you plan on making only a few copies, you can make them one at a time on your CD-R drive. If you want to make a bunch (more than a dozen), it may pay to send a master CD out to a production house for stamping--though you'll need to make sure your CD adheres to certain conventions in the mastering stage.
Eight Questions You Always Wanted to Ask About Making Your Own CD
By Jamie M. Bsales
Everyone has at least one skill they are expert in, whether it's installing a hard disk without tools or identifying at a glance the year, make, and model of every car made in the U.S. between 1959 and 1972. But few of us are well versed at making CD-ROM applications. So we've compiled a list of eight of the most common (and most basic) questions PC users tend to ask about this breaking technology.
Yes, you can, and most of the drive/software bundles have applets expressly for that purpose. There are copyright issues, however. You are allowed to make a copy of a CD-ROM that you bought yourself to use as a backup in case the original gets damaged, but you cannot legally bootleg CDs to give to friends. As for audio CDs, most music publishers' copyright agreements prohibit duplicates even for personal use.
Absolutely. But note that the most affordable CD-R drives play at only double speed, and keep in mind also the wear-and-tear factor: You're probably better off reserving the relatively expensive CD-R unit for recording tasks, while using a cheaper CD-ROM drive for your read-only tasks.
A CD blank can hold a total of 650MB of information. The amount of data you are able to fit there will be less than that, though, because each session of CD recording "wastes" 13MB of space to open and close each session, and for indexes and the like.
Can I put some data on a CD, then come back a week or month later and add more?
Yes, as long as the drive and mastering software you use support multisession recording, which will allow you to put different recording sessions on a single disk.
No. Currently, most media are certified only for a ten-year shelf life. Media manufacturers claim off the record that the data will last well beyond that, and more expensive disk formulations are certified for 100 years. Only time will tell.
Can I use File Manager to drag and drop files to a CD-R drive, just as I would to a floppy disk?
Not yet. Some of the premastering packages work in conjunction with File Manager to let you assemble files to be burned to the CD using that familiar interface. True drag-and-drop recording has been shown in the labs by some major vendors, and may be rolled out this year.
If I find a video or audio clip from a popular movie or the like, can I incorporate it into my multimedia presentation or training CD?
Legally? No. Though it might be tempting to sample Clint Eastwood saying, "Go ahead--make my day," into a presentation, you would be violating copyright laws. You're better off buying a "clip multimedia" package--the multimedia equivalent of clip art--from one of the many vendors (such as Corel) that now offer sets of royalty-free clips you can sprinkle into your CD apps.
Blank disks are down to $7 apiece in packs of ten, and even cheaper in bulk. Of course, you have to figure in the expense of wasted disks, especially as you learn the ins and outs. CD recorders with fairly robust software can be found for less than $1,000, and prices will continue to drop.
What's New Online
From March 25 through March 29, learn how to use multimedia authoring packages to create your own CD-ROM applications. Reviewers Linda and Erick Von Schweber will be online to answer your questions in PC Magazine's Editorial Forum on Compuserve (GO PCMAGNET).
Also from March 25 through March 29, visit www.pcmag.com and join in a discussion with contributing editor John R. Quain, talking about CD-R drives and premastering software.
Our Contributors: JIM SEYMOUR is a contributing editor of PC Magazine. JAMIE M. BSALES was the associate editor in charge of this story.
Copyright (c) 1996
Ziff-Davis Publishing Company