The CD-Rchive Handbook: Advanced Settings

Contents

## Advanced Settings

With the settings on the Advanced tab page, you can override some of the default values used by mkhybrid and cdrecord, create some special types of images and CDs and tailor the source paths provided on the Source and Target tab pages and more besides.
Make Bootable Image takes the path and filename of an existing boot image to be used in making an El Torrito bootable CD.
Not a simple task, read the man page for mkhybrid. In short, you need a boot image on the isofs, and you need to enter the path to the image relative to the / of the isofs. Just a regular kernel will not work!!
Generate Table creates a file called TRANS.TBL in each directory for use with non Rock Ridge compatable systems in reading directory entries. You will never need this if you are just using Linux and Windows / DOS and make an appropriate image file.
Omit Version Numbers likewise has very limited use since most systems ignore them anyway. You will presumably know if you need to use this.
Multimedia CD checkbox allows you to specify both a data file image and some audio files and record all in one operation.
See Writing Multimedia CDs for full information.
Mount Point allows you to specify where to mount the image file you have made to view and check it.
Normal points are /mnt or a vacant block device eg. /cdrom
Write Speed allows you to set the writing speed up to a limit of 16x at present, although I can currently test only to 8x.
After changing speeds do a dummy write before burning data, some CD Writers do not support a full range of speeds below their top speed and some are unreliable at speeds which theoretically they are capable of.
Buffer Size sets the fifo (ring buffer) size in MB. The default is 16MB, set it as high as possible, use 'free', 'top' or 'xosview' to see how much free memory you have and use it!. 16 MB is currently the maximum cdrecord will accept.
The buffer size becomes of increasing importance when recording on the fly.
Extra commandline switches
These edit controls allow you to specify switches not catered for in CD-Rchive.
For instance the switch -nofix stops cdrecord fixating and closing the CD. This can be used to record audio tracks separately for instance. If you are going to do special stuff like this, read the man pages for cdrecord and cdda2wav carefully.
This facility is provided for the sake of full functionality. You should be mindfull that to do operations other than writing with cdrecord or digital extraction to file with cdda2wav, you should use the commandline.
So if for instance you just want to run cdrecord -v -dev=1,6,0 -fix to fixate a CD that has deliberately been left open, you need to do that from the commandline.
You can turn off most of the other switches, but you can't change the assumtion that they are writing or extracting respectively. What you get in the commandline will be more than you want and will probably not work.
Exclude tab.
Specifying paths to exclude is often an easier way of including just a sub-set of files on a given path, than specifying the sub-paths individually.
For instance if you want to include all the sub-directories in /opt except /opt/kde, then specify /opt in the Source tab page and specify /opt/kde in the Exclude tab page combo-box
Much simpler than specifying all the other sub-directories specifically in the Source tab page.
The -data switch
The -data switch can be included into the commandline immediately before the image file name by checking the appropriate checkbox on the Advanced Settings.
The normal use for this is to differentiate between data and audio tracks when writing a list of image files as tracks to a CD.
For single track writing it is largely superfluous since cdrecord by default treats all .wav and .au files as audio and everything else as data.
Where you may need to use it is in making multi-session CDs.
These CDs are in CD-ROM XA mode 2 which the MAN page for cdrecord says are not supported by the hardware of all CD Writers and names Sony as an example.
My new HP CD Writer 9210i SCSI appears also not to support this mode and produces SCSI related error messages if I attempt to run cdrecord with the -multi switch set.
If however I force it by including -data in front of the file name, I can write multi-session CDs without a problem.
If you have problems, try it
Making Multi-Session CDs