🚀 go-pugleaf

>I have been following the theory in this thread with interest, but what
>about the practicalities?
>Is there any consensus as to what equipment and/or software is needed to
>effectively make good copies of CD to CDR?

I've had good results using a Ricoh MP6201S as a burner.  For reading
data off of the CD, I've used any of several different CD-ROM drives
(the Ricoh itself sometimes, an old Sony ATAPI drive sometimes, and a
24x Teac ATAPI drive sometimes).  The best Unix-based CD-reading
program seems to be cdparanoia - it's quite good at handling drives
which have imprecise audio-block addressing (high-level "jitter") and
has scratch detection and recovery capabilities as well.

I've used cdrecord 1.6 for track-at-once burning, and cdrdao for
audio disc-at-once burning.  Both work fine with the Ricoh.

>And what about vinyl? It would be nice to copy vinyl to CDR, for the
>convenience of the medium - you cannot play vinyl in the car!

You'll want a _good_ sound card.  The cheap ones (and some expensive
ones) have distortion and noise levels which you'll probably find
unacceptable.  There are some very useful sound-card tests to be found
at www.pcavtech.com - check 'em out.  The Ensoniq AudioPCI and clones
thereof seem to be a good choice - good performance for moderate price.

In my own vinyl-to-CD-R transferring work, I use an outboard
analog-to-digital converter, piped into the digital input of a Turtle
Beach Fiji sound card.

>For the latter, I have found it very convenient to copy vinyl on to a NICAM
>VCR, which makes it simple to get on the PC via the sound card, but what
>about software to break up the material into tracks?

I use xcdrdao - it's still in alpha test but is quite functional.  It
lets you create a DAO cue sheet for the "cdrdao" program.  You can
take data from one or more .WAV files, view the data waveform, and set
markers to indicate the track start points (including the pregap) and
index-number changes.

If you're stuck in the world of commercial Billville software, check
out Adaptec's Spin Doctor.  It was designed specifically for the job
of transferring LPs to CD-R.

>My Creative 32x CD ROM which sounded like a helicopter on take-off has just
>failed after only six months and I have replaced it with the much quieter
>Creative 36MX  model, so I would be reluctant to replace that with a SCSI
>model, so are there any IDE CD-R/RW writers out there that really do what
>they are supposed to? How about CD - IDE to CDR/RW - SCSI?

I don't recommend doing it this way.  It's generally better to
read the CD to disk as a .WAV file (an operation which can be done
non-real-time, allowing plenty of time for read retries, scratch
detection and correction, etc.), and then burn to CD-R in a separate
operation.  It takes longer, but there's much less chance of creating
a coaster due to a data underrun in the reading process.

--
Dave Platt                                        dplatt@feghoot.ml.org
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