CDR Language ?? Yup learn it !!. Review on Tips on Maintaining CD-RW

Burn Baby Burn!

So you finally managed to convince your parents(or bribed your wife) into letting you buy the CD burner. You got it in the mail yesterday, and 10 minutes later, it was added to your already exorbitant arsenal of computer gadgetry. So now what? How exactly do you burn things? And why is it called burning anyway? It sounds so destructive. Before you burning your way its better to understand what the CDR Language!

Learning the Language

Right about now, you are probably really impatient and ready to burn your first CD. My answer to you: Not so fast! Before you start burning anything, let's make sure you understand some of the basic terminology used in CD writing. Because if you don't, you'll find yourself knee deep in coasters. And there is our first term - coaster. A coaster refers to a CDR that was not written correctly. This could happen either because of user error, or hardware/software error. In the bad old days, most coasters were the result of software/hardware error. But today, things are much improved. Most of today's coasters are caused by user error.

Having said that, let's take a look at some of the basic terminology used in CD burning. The most common terms used in CD burning are:

Session

Multi Session

Lead In

Track

TOC

CDDA

ISO-9660

Joliet

Mixed Mode

These terms may seem daunting. But trust me, they are really quite simple. First, data on a CD is organized into tracks. You probably know that from your music CDs. Each song on a music CD is stored on a separate track. You can think of tracks as the basic unit for organizing different types of data on the CD. What exactly are different types of data? We'll get to that in just a little bit. So just remember that every time you write stuff to a CD, you are writing it to a track.

The next term to look at is session. The definition is not too far off from that of a recording session in the music industry. A recording artist goes into the studios to modify her album. Every time she does that, she is in a recording session. The term means the exactly the same in CD writing. Every time you write something to a CD, you are adding another session to the CD. So if you wrote multiple times to the same CDR disc(so for example if you burned Windows 2000 to the CD on Monday, and added Half Life to it on Wednesday), then you've created a multi session CD.

Also related to the word session is the term Lead-In. Lead-In refers to an area at the beginning of a session that stores the session's information, such as where on the CD the session data starts, where it ends, what it contains. It is basically a table of contents for the stuff recorded in the session. For the technical minded, a lead-in takes up 4500 sectors on a CD, which is roughly 9 megabytes of data. That means you cannot create an infinite number of sessions.

A week later, you've got about 7000 files burned onto a CD. You are pretty proud of yourself. But now you wonder. How does the CD keep track(no pun intended) of all those files? The answer lies in the TOC, or Table of Contents. Just as the name may imply, the TOC keeps a long list of every file that's on the CD, their location on the CD, size, etc. Without the TOC, even if the CD is burned full of data, the computer will still think it is blank. If you've dabbed in hard drive partitioning before, the TOC on a CD is the equivalent of your FAT on a disk partition. If you've never heard of FAT before, don't despair. It's not that important. What is important is to understand that the table of contents tells the computer what the CD contains.

Then there are different types of data. Well, that's what the last few terms are. They are different data types. What will be covered here is somewhat technical in nature. It is interesting to know, but not necessary for CD burning.

First up is CDDA. CDDA refers to CD Digital Audio. It is the file format used to store audio data, like the music on your Backstreet Boys album. Sony and Phillips jointly developed the standard back in October of 1982. This standard is also known as Red Book. Another term is ISO 9660. This is the file format used to store data files on a CD, such as directories, word documents, MP3 files, etc. The one major limitation of this international standard is that its file names had an 8.3 limit, reminiscent of the bad old DOS days. However, in today's Windows 9x driven world, 8.3 filenames are no longer acceptable. Hence, a new file format has been created to fill the gap created by ISO 9660. That file format is Joliet. The biggest improvement Joliet has over ISO is that it allows for long filenames and directory names. And finally, a Mixed Mode CD is a CD that contains both data files and audio files. Typically, all the data is stored as the last session on the CD, and all the audio is stored as the first session.

There are of course many other terms. But the who cares as long as it burns! Happy burning!