Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with cdr

How do I track my DVD-Rs?

tommorris — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:18:20 -0800

Is there any good, free UNIX/Linux software you can suggest for keeping a searchable index of removable media? I have a large collection of backed up files on DVD-R (about five or six hundred volumes). I have been using a proprietary and rather crufty application called CDFinder. My Mac laptop has become rather less stable recently (and I haven't got enough money for one of them nice new MacBooks), so I've made the leap to a netbook running Linux. This is the one application I can't find a decent equivalent for.

Ideally, I want an application that will maintain a database of all the metadata about the files on burned CD/DVD volumes. That metadata will obviously include the file names, creation/modification dates, but also ID3 data for audio files and the equivalent metadata for videos, photos, PDFs and all the other stuff I haven't really thought about. Search speed isn't tremendously important - it doesn't bother me if it takes fifteen seconds to do a search.

One of the things I would like would be for the data to be in an open format, and for the search tool to be usable from the command line (so I can use it over SSH).

I have done some Googling, but all I can find are the sort of things record collectors would use to keep track of their albums. Not what I want: I basically want UNIX's metadata-aware 'find' or 'locate' commands for unmounted volumes.

I've been thinking about building something like this myself as a fun little open-source project over the Christmas holidays. If someone has a suggestion of an existing project that would do what I want that is free, open source and preferably not tied to any windowing environments (command line ftw!), I'd be greatly appreciative.

Extracting phantom files from old CDRW

benzenedream — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:50:41 -0800

I have a legacy CDRW which shows up empty when mounted in either Linux or Windows. Extracting an iso image under linux via dd yields greppable strings which indicate files are hiding inside. How do I extract the files without knowing what format or filesystem they are in? Mounting the iso as a loop device in Linux yields no listable files. This disc is from ~2000. I assume the final FAT written to the disc is either corrupt or unreadable but files are written earlier on the disc. Is there a "file boundary guesser" that I can pipe the ISO to, which will spit out the possible files?

A rubber-stamping solution that's suitable for silver CD-Rs?

porn in the woods — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:17:08 -0800

Started up a DIY record label with a friend a while back. I'm looking for a rubber stamp that will be suitable for using on a silver-topped CD-R. Our first release was on inkjet-printable discs, which looked great but took ages to produce. Looking at this thread points me towards some vendor choices for the stamp. Anyone tried this method of disc identification?

Where can I get all black, undecorated CDRs?

caek — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 07:31:09 -0800

Where else can I get all black, undecorated CDRs like these (ideally in the UK/Europe)? I'm looking to order a few hundred CDRs that are plain black on both sides, with no branding on the top. These are perfect but, because they ship from the US and I'm in the UK, shipping would be slow and relatively expensive.

Does anyone know where I might source these CDs or similar on the right hand side of the Atlantic? SVP are the closest I've come (black bottom, printable white top, black bottom, branded black top). I dropped them a line but they said there wasn't enough demand for them to justify stocking plain black ones.

Failing all black, undecorated CDRs, CDRs with a plain black top and a regular silver bottom rather than the fancy Playstation-like black bottom would do.

Help an idiot find a software solution/program to archive/index his 400+ mp3/cdr's. (way more inside)

stavx — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 10:50:49 -0800

additional details and requirements I have about 400+ cdr's with mp3's on them. I simply have them numbered 1-400 and store them in a gigantor cd wallet.

All i want to do is:
- pop in the cdr
- label or name it in the program as (ie: cd1, cd2, etc.)
- The program would then scan the mp3's and list them within each cd-r volume.
- So when I want to load up my 20gb mp3 player (not an Ipod) I can simply search or query for the Pixies and it would return that I have the pixies songs located on
cd23, cd97 and cd259.
- preferably freeware, but at this point if it does the job reliably i will pay of course.

I have no need:
- for CDDB or Amazon tagging since all of the mp3's when they were ripped were tagged accurately and completely, and a lot of files are radio shows, unsigned music groups, bootlegs, unreleased or live shows that have no listings at these sites.
- I care not about album photo's, lyrics, bitrate, compression % or genre playlist type of indexing.
- I don't need an integrated player, tagger playlist dj music chooser or anything that these software suites offer.
- I am not catalogueing (sic) vinyl, cassettes or vhs, just mp3's and some .wav files.

The reason I am reaching out to my fellow Mefites is that I can't be the only one with this dilemma. Some of you may have employed external hard drives or use Itunes to handle your music archiving needs, but i simply want an easy way to know what I have and where it is.

And i'm noticing how fragile cdr's are with scratches and whatnot,I want to only handle them if I will be pulling tracks off of them on to my pc to load up in the player. I don't wantto individually pop them in and out of the cdrom drive to see what's on this one and what's on that one.

I have tried Helium, media monkey, music collectorz and a whole bunch of other "popular and indispensable" suites and have come up way short. The closest I came to the simplicity of what I was looking for was cdtree(http://www.vbknowledgesolutions.com/) and I purchased a copy from them for like $20.

The problem is that my serial doesn't take now that I have tried to reinstall it. I have emailed them for support, but I am planning ahead in case they can't help me and I need to find another program.
I was an early adopter of off loading my mp3's onto cdr'sand cd tree was the first program I found that did what I needed, but I figured that 5 years later there must have been someone else who has put a program together better andleaner and less prone to crashing and stalling like cdtree.

I am also going to transfer the cdr's to dvd-r to maximize space. This will put the 400 cd's on about 50 dvd-r.
I apologize in advance for the longwinded question.

Can't burn a CD on external drive on OS X...

dobbs — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 17:26:56 -0800

Problems burning a CD on an external drive using an iMac G3 600 with Tiger Okay, so my mom has a g3 600 with 340mb ram. I plugged in an external firewire cd burner and tried to burn a disc (I'd yanked it out of a windows machine and stuck it in an enclosure). No dice. It tells me "Burning the disc failed because communication to the disc drive failed (Error code 0x80020022)."

I figured it was the drive was too old or crap. So today I went and bought a USB 1.1 drive off some guy who had it hooked up to a slower G3 iMac (I think it was a 300). This is a Lacie 4x4x24 external drive.

I get the same damn error.

When I bring up the Get Info box on the CD after it gives me the error, the disc is locked and I can't unlock it (it's greyed). It also tells me the capacity is zero kb (though it was empty when I checked the info before trying to burn it).

I went to Lacie's site to see if there were any drivers. Nope. Either it's too old or doesn't need them.

The drive appears in the iMac's system Profile under "Disc Burning" as

Firmware Revision 3.0D
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Supported)
Cd-Write: -R, -RW
Write Strategies : cd-tao
Media: No.

WTF? I have to deliver this machine and drive to another city tomorrow for my mom and it's driving me nuts.

All I can think of is that maybe my blank CDs are cd+r instead of cd-r but I would think if that were the case they wouldn't appear on the desktop as 'untitled cd' when I put them in, would it? (The discs have no packaging to confirm.)

Any help appreciated.

How to burn a Winamp playlist

Satapher — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 15:04:33 -0800

How do I turn a Winamp playlist into a CDr?

How can I get CDR drive to work

donovan — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 10:46:18 -0800

Tech advice: CDR drive stopped working, replacement drive didn't work either, I'm trying to figure out my next move. The computer is a Dell Dimension desktop running XP that my wife uses everyday. I can't take it out of commission for any amount of time and don't want to replace it yet. Given that the new CDR drive didn't work either--I've replaced drivers, etc but it just isn't recognized--I'm assuming that something's bad on the board where the drive plugs in. Is that a reasonable assumption? There are no other slots to plug the drive into. I'm thinking I need to get a USB-based CDR. Does anyone have experience with a USB based CD drive, particularly when it comes to burning CDs?

How can I read CR-Rs with labels on them?

LairBob — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 06:59:14 -0800

CD-R problem: Anyone have any luck reading old CD-Rs that they were dumb enough to stick those printed labels on? [mi] A couple of years ago, we archived a whole bunch of old digital photos onto CD-R, and we were overzealous enough to print up those circular paper labels and stick them on. (The kind that basically cover the entire top side of the CD.)

Well, when we burned them, they worked fine, and as recently as several months ago, they still read fine. Now, though, the discs won't work in any of our CD/DVD drives...not our iMac, not my laptop, not the DVD player downstairs. They make some kind of loud noise as they spin now, which makes me think the paper label's probably soaked up some humidity and gotten warped and/or off-balance.

Anyone here have any luck resurrecting a disc in this state, either with a home-grown solution, or by sending it off to a service? Part of me is thinking to maybe try to dehumidify it, by either putting it in a warm environment or sticking it in a container with one of those little chemical packs, but the more rational part of me is highly dubious. Any ideas, or recovery service recommendations, are very welcome.

How to make an updatable CD-Rom

Pericles — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:30:16 -0800

Making an "updatable" CD-Rom (lots of linked, searchable pdfs/ docs) that needs to check the web for updated documents and download them to user's hard-drive, subsequently seamlessly showing data from HD/ CD as necessary. Any resources on coding said beast? Google-fu fails me. I'm envisaging a PC-based solution; perhaps browser-based, downloading .docs/ .pdfs./ .swfs that are on ftp://updates.website.com with a later create date than their corrollaries on the cd.

I'm agnostic as to programming languages.

How do I normalize wavs using a CUE file before burning to CDR?

PinkStainlessTail — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 12:02:36 -0800

I've got a bunch of wavs. I've got a CUE file that references said wavs. Is there a program that will take that CUE sheet and normalize the volume across all tracks before I burn them to a cdr? Nero can supposedly do it as part of the burn process, but I'd rather not waste the disc if I don't like the results. I could use a rewriteable disc I suppose, but I'm curious about finding a better way.

Why does copying files from CD to my harddrive slow down my entire system?

pissfactory — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 06:28:41 -0800

Plextor CD-R - Copying files to harddrive sloooowwwws computer way down. [mi] I have a plextor CD-R drive. When I write to it I throttle the write time to 4x or 8x otherwise it slows my system down drastically (to the point of being unusable). That is OK, because I have a solution.

Now, when I copy files from a CD onto my harddrive (like a sic of mp3s) it totally renders my system incapacitated while copying. Is there a way to throttle the read speed? I would rather set these copies up in the background and be able to work while they are going than to have to twiddle my thumbs.

Can I use a DVD+RW disc as if it were a CD-RW disc?

urban greeting — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 01:21:24 -0800

Can I use a DVD+RW disc as if it were a CD-RW disc? My girlfriend bought herself a pack of 10 DVD+RW discs, but her machine only has a CD-R(W) drive. Has she (as I fear) just acquired a set of expensive coasters, or can she burn onto them as if they were a normal CD-RW?

bent CD, what can I try?

Yelling At Nothing — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 01:13:40 -0800

Slightly bent CD: I have a CD that's (somehow) become slightly bent; you wouldn't notice when you picked it up, but one side is bent downward just enough that it scrapes in my CD-ROM drive. I've had it under a stack of books for the last couple days, thinking that might straighten it, but it doesn't seem to have worked thus far. Is there anything else I can try?

Anyone know who makes good blank CDRs nowadays?

skallas — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 04:01:26 -0800

VCD headaches. I used to be able to burn VCDs (or super VCDs) that would play on multiple DVD players until recently. Its not the drive as I've tried two different ones. I'm suspecting the media. Anyone know who makes good blank CDRs nowadays? Or if there's a brand that is DVD player friendly? I've tried burning at lower speeds too. Same results. I'm really thinking its the media, but I'm out of the loop on who makes quality blanks nowadays.

Playing MPG1 on DVD player from DVD-R?

scarabic — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 17:29:09 -0800

MPG1 + CD-R = VCD

MPG1 + DVD-R = ???

Preferably, something I can play on my console DVD player.

I have a mystery CD burner; how do I tell what model it is? Also recommendations for free CD burner programs?

Frasermoo — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 02:49:01 -0800

I've just bought a CD-Burner from ebay. No maker's mark on it, so how can I tell what model it is? (lots of serial numbers all over it). Also, I need a good CD burning program. Can anyone recommend any free applications? Ignore first part of that. I googled E118405 and it came up with Philips.

What's the best way to split a 1.5 GB file onto 3 or 4 CDs using OS X?

inksyndicate — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 17:18:50 -0800

Let's say I have an Apple OS X computer with a gigantic, 1.5 GB file that I'd like to put onto 3 or 4 CDs, to give someone. What's the best way to spread a file across several discs? Multiple zip files? The UNIX zip command? Some backup program?

Is it true that a CD I burn at home could damage my car's CD player?

signal — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 12:08:59 -0800

Recently bought a car and the radio plays CDs. The panel says "CD/CD-R", but the manual had a big sticker across the cover saying "using non-original, recorded discs may damage this radio" etc. Is this some ass-covering copyright related legal thingie, or is it true that a CD I burn at home could damage the player?

How do I slow down my CD drive so it's quieter?

Aaorn — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 12:16:33 -0800

My 48x CD-R drive is *really loud*. Is there any way to slow it down for basic tasks like audio CD playback? Googling finds me some brand-specific "control panel" apps, but this is a no-name model. Is there a generic utility out there?

Windows XP CDs

kindall — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 23:30:12 -0800

Dumb Windows XP question time. I burned some files to a CD-ROM using Nero. Then I burned some more files to the same CD-ROM, creating a multisession CD. Afterward, when I insert the CD into the drive, I see only the second batch of files on the disc. On the Mac I'd expect to see a separate volume icon for each session; how do I access the various sessions under Windows?