CDRDAO
Disk-At-Once Recording of Audio and Data CD-Rs/CD-RWs
Application Examples
Here are some applications of cdrdao:

CD Copying

The following command will copy the CD in the source drive specified with option --source-device to the CD-R/CD-RW inserted in the destination drive specified with option --device. Only a single session will be copied which can be selected with option --session (default: 1st session). If you want to keep the session open you will have to use option --multi.

cdrdao copy --source-device 0,2,0 --device 0,5,0 --buffers 64

The option --buffers is used to adjust the ring buffer size. Each buffer holds 1 second audio data. Dividing the specified number of buffers by the writing speed gives the approx. time for which data input my be stalled, e.g. 64 buffers and writing at 4x speed results in 16 seconds.

On the fly copying is selected with option --on-the-fly. No intermediate data will be stored on the disk in this case.

If the source CD contains audio tracks and the source drive is slow you should consider to reduce the audio extraction qualtiy with option --paranoia-mode or reduce the writing speed.

The standard generic SCSI interface of the Linux kernel cannot handle multiple commands in parallel. Since the reading and the writing part of cdrdao use the generic SCSI interface mutual blocking will occur. This results in low fill rates of cdrdao's ring buffer and very likely produces buffer under runs.

To avoid these problems you should apply Heiko Eißfeldt's sg-buffer patch. It is available for 2.0.x and 2.1.x kernels. For 2.2.x kernels the SG-2.2.tar.gz patch should be used. Kernel versions >= 2.2.6 do not need any patch.

I strongly recommend to perform some simulation runs before trying real writing.

 

Creation of a CD with Live Music

Assume you have a WAVE file live.wav that contains several minutes of live music and you want to divide it in tracks every 5 minutes with further subdivisions by index marks. You will have to create following toc-file live.toc:
CD_DA
TRACK AUDIO
FILE "live.wav" 0 5:0:0
INDEX 3:0:0

TRACK AUDIO
FILE "live.wav" 5:0:0 5:0:0

TRACK AUDIO
FILE "live.wav" 10:0:0 5:0:0
INDEX 2:0:0

...
Then use
cdrdao write live.toc
to create a CD without any pre-gaps between the tracks.

 

Creation of a CD with a "Secret" Pre-gap before 1st Track

The toc-file
CD_DA
TRACK AUDIO
FILE "secret-pregap.wav"
START
FILE "track1.wav"

TRACK AUDIO
FILE "track2.wav"

...
will create a CD with a pre-gap before track 1 that contains audio data from file secret-pregap.wav. You will have to scan backwards when playing the first track with your CD player to hear the "secret" music.
Last update: Sep/15/2002
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