--------------------------------------------------
FAQ for X-CD-Roast 0.98alpha13
01.01.2003 Thomas Niederreiter <tn@xcdroast.org>
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Note: The most current version is always available at
http://www.xcdroast.org/faq
Overview:
* 1. What is X-CD-Roast and who is working on it?
* 2. Why doesn't X-CD-Roast find all of my hardware?
(CD-Burners/CD-ROMs/DVD-Drives/harddrives)
* 3. Why is there no more direct partition support in the new
X-CD-Roast?
* 4. My writer is not on the supported list! Is is supported anyway
or when it will be supported?
* 5. I cant compile X-CD-Roast 0.98!
* 6. I think I've found a bug! How do I report it to you?
* 7. My language is not supported yet! Can I do the translation for you?
* 8. When will you release the final version?
* 9. The CDDB-lookup does not work! Why?
* 10. Will there be multisession and bootable CD support?
* 11. You say X-CD-Roast 0.98 will not need root or suid-bit? How is
this possible? (Non-root-mode?)
* 12. What about audio-quick copy?
* 13. Why don't you offer CVS access?
* 14. I am a cdwriter-vendor and I want to sponsor you!
* 15. Why does X-CD-Roast report to write up to 750 MB when only 650 MB
do fit on a CD-R?
* 16. All seems to be fine, but I cannot write!!! X-CD-Roast 0.96e
always worked great!
* 17. Uh...I feel stupid but how to write downloaded ISO-images?
* 18. Can I write an audio CD from mp3? Or from wav-files I created
myself?
* 19. How to see the commands X-CD-Roast generates to learn
something about cdrecord?
* 20. Hmm...CD-Text not working yet?
* 21. Why are the tooltips no longer yellow?
* 22. What is the meaning of "Warning: creating filesystem that does
not conform to ISO-9660"?
* 23. X-CD-Roast tells me that my "cdrtools binaries are not
compatible with my system". What does this mean?
* 24. I wrote a second session to a multi session CD but I can't see it!
* 25. How to get this DVD-support working?
* 26. Write performance is bad or my system freezes!
* 27. What means "cdrecord: ISRC '5099750153420' has illegal length."?
* 28. That new ATAPI mode causes problems! Should I use it?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/1. What is X-CD-Roast and who is working on it?/
X-CD-Roast is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the command-line
cdrtools. You can do anything X-CD-Roast does yourself using these tools
- but it's nicer and easier with the frontend. The cdrtools contain
"cdrecord" (does do the hard job supporting all the cdwriters and is
doing the actual writing of CDs), "readcd" (reads data-tracks of CDs -
its a portable replacement of "dd"), "mkisofs" (masters CD-/images from
given file-trees on the harddisk) and "cdda2wav" (reads audio-tracks).
Cdrecord, readcd and mkisofs are maintained by Joerg Schilling, cdda2wav
by Heiko Eissfeldt and X-CD-Roast by me, Thomas Niederreiter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/2. Why doesn't X-CD-Roast find all of my hardware?
(CD-Burners/CD-ROMs/DVD-Drives)/
A common problem is that X-CD-Roast fails to detect your CD-Writer or
any additional CD-ROM devices you might have. Current Linux
distributions install by default a special mode for CD-Writers, but not
for common CD-ROM drives. This results in that your Writer is usuable,
but your extra CD-ROM drive is not.
It fix that problem and to get all of your devices working, you have to
install that "special" mode for all of them (Not just the CD-writer).
That mode is called "scsi-emulation" and can be easily activated.
SCSI-devices are fine by default and need no special handling.
ATAPI/IDE, parallelport and USB devices need to installed via
scsi-emulation.
A common way how to install scsi-emulation on Linux is described a few
lines further down.
*** Please note the new direct ATAPI support on linux, as mentioned at
the end of this section.
Please see section 2 of the CD-Writing-HOWTO
<http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html> how to configure
your kernel on Linux. (a bit outdated!)
If you use not Linux but any other OS, you have to check the cdrecord
documentation how to access your writer.
*Note about configuring SCSI-emulation in Linux:*
The trick are these two lines (Examples for two drives which are
connected as master and slave on the secondary IDE controller):
/Line for /etc/modules.conf/
options ide-cd ignore='hdc hdd'
(This tells the IDE-driver to ignore the two devices you want to use
within X-CD-Roast)
-
/Line for /etc/lilo.conf/
append="hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi" (Kernel 2.2.x and most 2.4.x)
or
append="hdc=scsi hdd=scsi" (Kernel 2.4.x only, if the above line
does not work)
(And this tells the kernel to install scsi-emulation for two drives)
-
If you use grub instead of lilo you might try something like that:
/Example line for /boot/grub/grub.conf or /etc/grub.conf/
kernel /vmlinuz-2.2.19 ro root=/dev/hda6 hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi
(Kernel 2.2.x and most 2.4.x)
or
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda6 hdc=scsi hdd=scsi
(Kernel 2.4.x only, if the above line does not work)
You might have to load the scsi-emulation driver manually with the
following command.
/sbin/insmod ide-scsi; /sbin/insmod sg
Now X-CD-Roast should detect your drives.
Please note that you want to change your /dev/cdrom link from /dev/hdc
or /dev/hdd to /dev/sr0 or /dev/sr1, because the device files changed
through the different driver.
--
Note:
Starting with version 0.98alpha12 there is experimental support for
direct ATAPI support on linux kernels 2.4.x. Now X-CD-Roast should
detect all your devices out-of-the-box on all current linux
distributions. Please note, that the ATAPI interface does not support
DMA transfers at all and therefore you might have high system
load using it.
* See also question Nr. 28.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/3. Why is there no more direct partition support in the new X-CD-Roast?/
Partition support was introduced in X-CD-Roast about 4 years ago. At
this time using a raw partition to save image-data was safer than going
through a filesystem. Today the computers are so fast, that using a
raw-partition is absolutly nonsense. The partitions were also a severe
security risk, because if you set them wrong, you were able to delete
your system. In version 0.98 of X-CD-Roast you can specify an unlimited
number of directories where the image/audio-data can be stored. This is
much more flexible and transparent. If you still have some extra
partitions dedicated only for cdwriting with X-CD-Roast, you simple have
to format them and mount them somewhere. Then you just specify this
mountpoint in X-CD-Roast setup and you can use it like in former version
of X-CD-Roast. (But you also can store any other data on it...X-CD-Roast
will NOT delete any data it does not recognize)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/4. My writer is not on the supported list! Is is supported anyway or
when it will be supported? /
Please look at the cdrecord-homepage
<http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html>
for a current list of supported writers. But even when your writer is
not on the list, chances are very high that it is supported. Newer
writers (less than one year) usually are SCSI3/MMC conform, which means
that they run anyway, even when their name is not on that list. All
ATAPI-Writers are supported. Parallel-Writers are also all supported,
when the parallel-port driver in the Linux kernel works. (See your
Kernel-documentation)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/5. I can't compile X-CD-Roast 0.98!/
X-CD-Roast is by now very easy to compile. If you have problems you
should read the README file which explains all step-by-step. However I
recommend to install X-CD-Roast from source-RPMs. There it is almost
impossible to do anything wrong. See the download section of
www.xcdroast.org for instructions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/6. I think I found a bug! How do I report it to you?/
If you think you found a bug you have first to find out if you can
reproduce it reliably. Then run xcdroast in debug mode (-d 10 switch)
and send me the output. Please describe what exactly you have done and
what went wrong.
If you have no idea how to get the debug output into a file try this:
xcdroast -d 10 2>/tmp/debugoutput.txt
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/7. My language is not supported yet! Can I do the translation for you?/
I am looking for people who volunteer to translate X-CD-Roast.
Starting with version 0.98alpha11 uses gettext as translation-engine. Please
refer to the TRANSLATION.HOWTO included with X-CD-Roast for more details.
Big thanks to all who sent me already translations!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/8. When will you release the final version?/
Good question. I really do not know. I have plenty of other things to
do, but I try hard to make any release as quick as possible. There will
be a lot of test versions before the final release which will be
somewhere in middle of 2003.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/9. The CDDB-lookup does not work! Why?/
Starting with version 0.98alpha11 I support CDDB via HTTP and proxies.
0.98alpha12 even supports proxy-authentication. To use that feature you
simply enter your proxy-server in the format "user:password@hostname" in
the X-CD-Roast setup.
Please send debug output if you still have problems.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/10. Will there be multisession and bootable CD support?/
Version 0.98alpha10 added full multisession support and with version
0.98alpha11 bootable CD creation got much simpler.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/11. You say X-CD-Roast 0.98 will not need root or suid-bit? How is this
possible? (Non-root-mode?)/
Earlier version of X-CD-Roast needed root permissions to access the
partition stuff. But because I've thrown this out there is no reason for
root in the GUI. This is much safer and also disabled the need for a
non-root mode. X-CD-Roast is automatically safe to be run by any user.
This is possible because only the helper application will get suid-root
to get access to the scsi-hardware. The tools itself will drop their
root permissions as fast as possible to make it very hard to exploit
them (buffer-overrun or stuff like that). Any security issues will be
taken care of in the tools itself. Should be very hard to do any harm
with them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/12. What about audio-quick copy?/
Currently quick-copy (copying without buffering any tracks on harddrive)
only works for pure data-CDs. We are working on audio-quick copy, so
that the final version of X-CD-Roast 0.98 should offer this feature.
(The real problem is, that the cdrtools do not yet support that feature,
so X-CD-Roast can't utilize it.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/13. Why don't you offer CVS access?/
At the moment I don't want anybody to get the sources without my
approval. In this early stage are too many changes all the time and any
CVS archive would only disappoint you because the code won't work at all.
Anyway - I created a CVS-repository at sourceforge. You are free to drop
by.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/14. I am a cdwriter-vendor and I want to sponsor you!/
Fine! If you send me free hardware, I can test X-CD-Roast with it and
recommend it to other users. I also will put your logo on my webpage.
Please don't hesitate to contact me.
Current sponsors are:
* RICOH <http://www.ricoh.com>, who gave me a CD-R/RW MP7060S, a
DVD/CDRW MP9120 and a MP7125A
* SANYO <http://www.sanyo.com>, who gave me a CRD-RW1, a CD-R
CRD-R800S, a CRD-BP2 and CRD-BP1300P
* SONY <http://www.sony.com>, who gave me a CRX-140S
* AOPEN <http://www.aopen.com>, who gave me a CRW4048
Also thanks to Netplace <http://www.netplace.de> for hosting my domain.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/15. Why does X-CD-Roast report to write up to 750 MB when only 650 MB
do fit on a CD-R?/
This or any other questions about the size-calculations of X-CD-Roast
relate to the used sector sizes. First of all you have to understand
that there is a big difference between writing a data CD or an audio CD.
When you look at a standard CD-R there may be written on it: Capacity 74
Min / 650 MB. The first number is capacity that fits on an audio CD. The
second relates only to data CDs. So how comes that X-CD-Roast insits on
needing almost 750 MB space for 74 min audio? An audio CD consists of
2352 bytes sectors - as opposed to 2048 bytes needed for data! In
reality also the data-sector takes up 2352 bytes - but only 2048 bytes
are useable for you - the other 304 bytes are used for error-correction,
sector numbers and stuff.
So, when a CD-R vendor tells you about 650 MB capacity this means that
you calculate with 2048 byte sectors. And because the audio-sectors are
bigger, you need more space to rip audio to the harddrive. So, reading a
74 Min CD to the harddisk takes up to
74 * 60 seconds * 44100 hz sample rate * 2 (16 bit) * 2 (stereo) =
783216000 bytes = 746 MB.
And 746 MB is the size X-CD-Roast reports! Because thats exactly the
free size you need on your harddrive to save the audio-tracks. Don't
worry that this might not fit on your CD-R just because the vendor wrote
650 MB on it - X-CD-Roast will warn you in any case when something might
not fit. And if you don't believe X-CD-Roast, then calculate yourself!
As a rule of thumb - when creating audio CDs, watch the minute counter
and when doing data watch the MB counter. Its just as simple as it sounds.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/16. All seems to be fine, but I cannot write!!! X-CD-Roast 0.96e always
worked great!/
The old version did only write in Track-at-once mode (TAO), because at
that time cdrecord did not support otherwise. X-CD-Roast 0.98 however
does default to DAO (Disc-at-once) because this is the only mode for
good audio copies. Most writers work with cdrecord and DAO fine, but
yours obviously not. Switch to TAO mode in the write-menu and you have
the same behaviour as with the old X-CD-Roast.
(DAO/SAO may work fine with the most recent version of cdrecord and your
drive)
If DAO mode fails you should try the RAW modes - once you find the best
write mode for your drive you should be happy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/17. Uh...I feel stupid but how to write downloaded ISO-images?/
If you downloaded an ISO-image (e.g. a linux distribution) you have to
copy that big file (extension should be .iso) first to an
image-directory of X-CD-Roast. You specify these directories in Setup at
the "HD Settings" tab. These are the places where X-CD-Roast will look
for audio (.wav) or data tracks.
Now you enter the "Create CD" menu and you will see your image-file
displayed nicely in the "Image-Information" window. Go to "Write Tracks"
-> click on "Layout tracks" tab, add your image-file, click on "Accept
track layout" and finally a click at "Write tracks" will write that
image perfectly to your CD-R/RW.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/18. Can I write an audio CD from mp3? Or from wav-files I created myself?/
As X-CD-Roast 0.98alpha13 is not yet able to handle mp3-files directly,
you have to convert the files yourself into wav-format. There are a lot
of ways to do this - you can try /mpg123 -w myfile.wav myfile.mp3/.
In the end you have a lot of wav-files which should be written as
audio-CD. Just make sure X-CD-Roast does find your wav-files in its
image-directories and then just go ahead like described in FAQ Question
17 <#17>.
*Note:* X-CD-Roast can only write CD-quality wav-files (44.1khz, 16 bit,
stereo) - If your files do not meet this requirements they will be
displayed with an audio-icon with a red slash through it. This files
can't be written and will be ignored until you convert them into a
proper format.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/19. How to see the commands X-CD-Roast generates to learn something
about cdrecord?/
In order to learn how X-CD-Roast does call the cdrecord-tools you can
start X-CD-Roast with the -d 1 flag, or set in the setup the loglevel to
"verbose" and see the logfile.
This way its easy for you to try out new versions of cdrecord on the
commandline to see if some problem is already fixed there.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/20. Hmm...CD-Text not working yet?/
Starting with version 0.98alpha10 CD-Text reading/editing/writing is
fully supported.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/21. Why are the tooltips no longer yellow?/
Former versions of X-CD-Roast 0.98 set the tooltip color manually to
yellow, overriding each setting that may came by a theme. This also
broke multibyte fonts. If you no longer have yellow tooltips and you
want them back, you have to edit your or the systemwide gtkrc file.
Add the following lines to your ~/.gtkrc file, or to
/usr/local/etc/gtk/gtkrc (or /etc/gtk/gtkrc - depends where you
installed GTK):
style "gtk-tooltips-style" {
bg[NORMAL] = "#ffffc0"
}
widget "gtk-tooltips" style "gtk-tooltips-style"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/22. What is the meaning of "Warning: creating filesystem that does not
conform to ISO-9660"?/
Ignore this warning printed by mkisofs. If you use the various
extensions of the ISO-9660 file system, you are no longer strictly
following the ISO-9660 standard. The recorded cd will be readable
nevertheless on most systems.
If you really want to get rid of that message, you have to deactivate
all the master-options - the resulting CD will then just work good on
DOS systems and is mostly useless everywhere else.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/23. X-CD-Roast tells me that my "cdrtools binaries are not compatible
with my system". What does this mean?/
This is a common linux problem. cdrecord and cdda2wav use a technique
called "memory-mapping" (mmap) to do their work. This requires however
that the kernel and libc versions do exactly match to the system where
these tools have been compiled. If you use binaries from other systems
the memory adresses do not longer match and cdrecord aborts with this
mmap-error. This means you have to install versions that are compiled
for your system. Easiest to do so is to compile them yourself (just
rebuild the cdrtools-source-rpm, see the xcdroast-download page
<http://www.xcdroast.org/xcdr098/rpms-a13.html>) or to get the correct
RPMs for your system. After you replaced the old cdrtools with the
correct compiled versions X-CD-Roast should work fine.
You might run into that problem with the binary-only releases of
cdrecord-ProDVD. On linux these require at least kernel 2.4.x to work -
you have to update you kernel if you want to use it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/24. I wrote a second session to a multi session CD but I can't see it!/
Chances are very high that the CD was written correctly, but you simply
fail to read it the right way. Reading multi session requires support in
the operating system and in the reading drive itself. Also keep in mind
that some graphical GUIs like KDE or Gnome tend to cache CD-Contents and
you DON'T see any changes on your CD until you force a refresh.
To check if a CD was correctly written always mount it manually or even
check it on a different machine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/25. How to get this DVD-support working?/
I included a file "README.ProDVD" with X-CD-Roast which explains how to
install the DVD version of cdrecord (cdrecord-ProDVD). That file is with
all the other Documention most likely in
/usr/share/doc/xcdroast-0.98alpha13/ on your system when you installed
the RPM version.
Also note that you can only create pure Data-DVDs only. Technically
Video-DVDs are Data-DVDs too, but with a special directory-structure.
Its impossible to try to copy an encrypted Video-DVD to a writeable
DVD-media. (The DVD key sector cannot be written to a writeable
DVD-media because they hardcoded that sector as "unwriteable").
Theoretically its possible to write unencrypted Video-DVDs, you just
have to prepare the correct data yourself first and then master and burn
it with X-CD-Roast. (Enable the "DVD Video" option in the ISO-settings)
Another topic is that cdrecord-ProDVD only supports DVD-R/W yet. DVD+RW
is something completely different and you dont need cdrecord to write on
that. Please see http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/ for more
information for Linux systems and DVD+RW/+R.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/26. Write performance is bad or my system freezes!/
If your system is put into high stress while you write a CD you might
get buffer underruns or in the worst case the system locks up
completely. Almost always these problems hint towards an incorrectly
configured system.
First check the transferrate of your harddrive - on linux there is a
tool called hdparm which does a nice job here.
/sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda
This will measure the raw read throughput of your drive - you should see
values like 20-30MB/s for modern drives. If you are way below that value
you cannot write CDs in high-speed. Check if DMA transfer is enabled for
that drive. (See "man hdparm" for details).
Next thing is to check if you have other programs which also access the
CD-ROM/CD-Writer. Desktop-Systems often have KDE or Gnome running which
try to automount each inserted CD. This often kills cdrecord. Turn off
all this automatic CD handling in the Setup of KDE/Gnome. There are also
CD-Player applets in KDE and Gnome which should be disabled.
Now we check the writer device itself. Use hdparm again to see if DMA is
enabled. For some systems DMA should be on, on others it should be
disabled. You have to try for yourself which configuration gives you the
best results.
/sbin/hdparm -d 0 -u 0 -k 1 /dev/hdc
This command disables DMA transfers /dev/hdc (possibly your CD-Writer).
Some reports told me that this often fixed problems.
If you still have problems you can try to set the "Set SCSI IMMED flag"
option within the X-CD-Roast write dialog. On systems where harddrive
and writer are on the same IDE bus this can improve the behaviour.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/27. What means "cdrecord: ISRC '5099750153420' has illegal length."?/
When cdrecord aborts writing with a message about illegal ISRC or MCN
numbers, then it means that you got bad data from the CD you read before.
The manufacturer of that CD has put that illegal data on it and cdda2wav
retrieved it as you read the tracks. cdrecord won't write illegal data
and complains.
The quickest fix for that is to simply delete the *.inf files that belong
to that CD. A future version of X-CD-Roast will detect these error before
writing and offer to remove them automatically. For now you do it yourself.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/28. That new ATAPI mode causes problems! Should I use it?/
That new ATAPI mode is enabled by default in X-CD-Roast on linux.
It requires a kernel 2.4.x and is able to access ATAPI devices directly
through the IDE driver, without the help of SCSI emulation.
However, that mode is still experimental and causes some problems.
Using a CD writer in that mode is not recommended - please use always
SCSI emulation here. The ATAPI mode on a writer will cause great delays
in all X-CD-Roast operations, because communication with a device takes
much more time. You will also notice a lot of driver errors in your
system log files. This seems to be normal.
You can tell X-CD-Roast to ignore the ATAPI mode when you start it with the
"-a" option.
There is also no DMA transfer supported at all though the ATAPI interface.
On some not correctly installed machines X-CD-Roast will find your devices
both via SCSI emulation and via ATAPI - they are displayed double in the
setup. Things could work nevertheless, but use the scsi-emulated devices
only then. (The devices without the "ATAPI:"-marking)
Conclusion: Use your writer only with SCSI emulation, but a normal CD/DVD-ROM
drive as read only device will work fine in ATAPI mode. This is also the
default setup for many Linux distributions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Any FAQ I forgot? Please contact me...
01.01.2003 Thomas Niederreiter (tn@xcdroast.org)
