Duplicating packet written CD

Burning Software
#1

We use DirectCD to archive all of our meetings. DirectCD hasn’t been a problem, but making a master and replicating it is. I need to create 300 formatted disks every year, so formatting disks one-by-one is starting to get tedious. It appears that all of the duplicators sold are egeneered to be “smart” in checking the CD… I want just the opposite… I just want the duplicator to blindly read and write without trying to “fix” anything… I’d like it to be completely “stupid”, just write a 1 where it needs to be… Does anyone know of a way around this? Can I use special software to tell the duplicator to write packet written disks?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The recording software we use is FTR Gold and it relies on DirectCD to archive to the CD, so using another proccess (outside DirectCD) isn’t an option.

Best Regards,
Kyle Overmiller

#2

We use DirectCD to archive all of our meetings.
If your data is that unimportant that you are willing to use DirectCD and risk losing all your data, then you should delete it all. That’s much faster. I’m sure you’re the only one on earth who was able to make so many DirectCD discs without any trouble.

#3

Carefull, Alex, you’ll have the UDF-pack on your butt.

McShaken
I too am curious as to why you use UDF for this task. I would use Nero, write the data to an image file. (Image Recorder), then you can burn copies all day long without a care, at high speed.
To clarify, once the data is written to one CDRW, copy the data to HD and burn to CDR. Or do the 300 users also have the DirectCD-dependant software?

#4

The Legislature decided to use a recording product called FTR Gold:

Basically, we have 5 hearing rooms and the House and Senate Floor that use the FTR product. Since archiving the audio to a server and then CD would be expensive and time consuming, we’re archiving straight to the CD. We’ve been very happy with it so far. The only issue I’m having is creating these freakin formatted disks, one at a time.

So, as far as moving to another product, this is something I can’t do. I just need to find out if there’s any way to mass-produce DirectCD formatted disks. Duplicators seem to want to check everything, so it sees the packet written disks as filled with a bunch of errors because the TOC is pointing to areas that aren’t yet there. It tries to correct this because it sees this as an “error”. I need a duplicator, or software that can control a duplicator that will only write what it sees, with NO error checking. I need to read and write EXACTLY what it sees. Exact 1:1

Any ideas?

#5

You can’t copy to a HD then burn to CDR?
In other words, you’re saying that the end-user of these RW discs can only read them in the same “DirectCD-dependant” program?
A quick look at the “FTR Player” FAQ’s suggests that it can play a file from any directory, so a copy of the file on a CDR would work?
I also found this product that may be something to look at.
http://www.ftrgold.com/ftrgold/cd/default.asp

#6

There’s two pieces to this process.

First, legislative staff record hearings to the DirectCD formatted disk (so they can go to different hearing rooms, keeping the same committee on the same CD). It’s important to have it in the DirectCD format since it archives on the fly and it allows staff to use it like a floppy.

Second, when we get requests for audio, I take the audio from the original DirectCD formatted CD and put it onto a standard CD-R that includes a tool that, when inserted, checks the registry to see if the FTRPlayer Plus software is loaded. If it is, it’ll launch the player, if not , it’ll launch the installation of the player. Once the Legislative session is over, the CDs are then sent to archives, where they’ll live out the rest of their lives in darkened bliss.

The CD product that FTR sells only has the player installed on it, allowing users to add audio as needed. Since we send our CDs out to the public, it needs to be as “user friendly” as possible. Hence, we take our CDs one step farther than FTR.

At any rate, everything works great… Except, that is, having to create all these blasted formatted CDs…

Just need to find a product (hardware and/or software) that will allow me to duplicate a master DirectCD formatted disk to 8-10 burners at a time instead of using DirectCD’s formatting process that only allows formatting disks one at a time.

Thanks for looking into this.

#7

I guess I’m not sure what this is actually writing to the CDRW, but it should be possible to simply copy the files from the CDRW and burn to a CDR. It sounds as though you are already doing this in some fashion.

I would also really like to know how many of those CDRW discs resting in the archive are corrupt. You may be in a unique position to do the first large-scale real-world study on the reliability of CDRW discs.

#8

Whoops… should have clarified. We only use CD-R disks since they have a superior shelf life (100+ years vs 30) Once the disk gets full (we can hold up to 14 hours of audio per 80 min CD) we grab another one. So, during the start of Session, I’ve got 6 spindles of 50 CDs formatted and ready to go. So far DirectCD has been about 95% without errors. If errors occur, I’ve always been able to pull the audio from the corrupted CD to another blank, formatted one without any problems. As far as pulling from previous Sessions. I’ve been sending out CDs from the 2002 Session with very few issues. And anything that comes up, I’m able to deal with… Until we can start archiving to a $$server$$ with tons of disk space, this is what I’m stuck with.

If you know anyone who has any experience with duplicating packet written disks, please forward them my email address:

overmill_ky@leg.wa.gov

I’d be happy to hear any suggestions (aside from scrapping the system) that will keep me from having to create these blasted formatted disks one at a time.

#9

Formatting a CD-R disc with DirectCD is relatively fast, usually just a few seconds, so I’m not quite sure why this is such a problem. DirectCD allows formatting of more than one drive at a time. I can format two CD-RW disks at the same time, so you should be able to do this with CD-R as well. The formatting drives have to be started individually. I’m not sure how many drives can be supported this way as I only have two burners with which to test.

In order to do 8-10 discs at a time, one possible solution would be to use a SCSI tower setup. If the standard DirectCD format can support this many burners, you would have to start them individually but would not have to change discs. The CD-R format is so fast that the first disc might be finished before the last was started.

You might check with Roxio to see how many drives DirectCD can recognize and format simultaneously with a SCSI setup.

#10

One idea:
Many years ago, when I used DirectCD on my 2/2/6 writer, i had version 3.0.
It was possible to use Adaptec (on those time, ECDC and DirectCD were sold by Adaptec) CD Copier to make a copy of a finalized packet-written CD.
Does that still work? The files were reordered, and the destination disc was not in packet writing format then, but this shouldn’t be a problem.

No idea if that can work non-finalized discs.
But again, I can’t recommend that at all.

And about your 100+ years: The actual life span of cd media is between some weeks and an unknown number of years, so make sure you don’t use any bad media.