Round Here

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 21, 1998

David Flynn

As the data gets bigger, the storage gets smaller. David Flynn reports on the smart way to save - discs.

FIRST it was photo-quality colour printers, then scanners. Now CD-Recorders are the latest piece of hardware to trickle down from the mahogany corridors of big business to the bedrooms and studies of the average PC-equipped home.

Although the average CD-R kit is priced between $750 and $1,000, you can find them for as low as $500 and blank discs for about $5. All of a sudden, almost anyone can create, or "burn", a CD that holds 650Mb of data, be it music, images or just plain text.

Increasing numbers of companies, both large and small, rely on CD-R technology to back up their vital data, such as monthly accounts and customer databases. About $5 for 650Mb of insurance is extraordinary value. Custom CDs can also contain PowerPoint presentations that can be played on any PC or Macintosh, or brochures, artwork and other promotional material for clients and colleagues.

At home you can save digital photographs onto a CD photo album and perhaps build a CD-based Web page so anyone with a Web browser and a CD-ROM drive can enjoy the snapshots.

You can use desktop video editing software (see Icon, October 31, archived online) to save home movies as a video clip on a CD. By reducing the movie's resolution you can squeeze a 10-minute mini-epic onto one disc.

Of course, the two most popular reasons for buying a CD-R drive is to duplicate software and music CDs. What are the legalities of this? Simply put, you can't duplicate anything for which you don't own copyright. That covers most software and music CDs.

That said, the copyright police aren't going to smash down your door for rolling your own Best of Kenny G CD (although the Good Taste SWAT team may). But if you start hammering out CDs for friends or workmates - as freebie favours or for sale, even to cover costs - you're breaking the law. And, as Icon's cover story of November 7 pointed out (it's also archived online), the software industry is getting serious about cracking down on piracy. You've been warned.

You are, however, allowed to copy free software, unregistered shareware and demo versions of software such as games that are posted on the Net for public download. You can also make a backup of any applications, utilities and games you own, in case the master discs are damaged. (You can even put several such programs onto a single CD, which costs less than one CD per program and is much more convenient when it comes to loading the software.)

If you belong to a band, you can cut demo discs for a record label or local radio station, or press some CDs for sale when you're playing at a particular venue. The standard 650Mb CD holds about 70 minutes of audio.

WHAT YOU NEED

Most modern Pentium-powered Windows and PowerPC Macs are up to the job. It helps if they've got plenty of memory - 32Mb is OK. You should have a large (upwards of 3Gb) hard drive or a high-speed removable storage solution such as the 1Gb Jaz drive.

While some CD recording techniques let you add files to the disc in several small batches, there are times when you want to burn the whole disc at once. You'll need 650Mb on hand to store the whole shebang before you whack it onto the CD.

The CD-R hardware comes in an assortment of flavours. There are internal and external drives (one sits inside your PC, the other alongside it). Then you get to choose between how the drive connects to and exchanges data with your PC: the fast but expensive SCSI bus, which also needs a SCSI card in the case of PCs, or the slower but affordable IDE interface which, on an external drive, connects to the PC's printer port.

Finally, there's the issue of CD-R versus CD-RW (CD Rewritable). CD-R drives and discs are the cheapest but, after you've recorded data or music onto the disc, it becomes read-only, like most CDs you buy off the shelf.

CD-RW drives let you re-use special CD-RW disks (which cost about $40), saving and deleting files as if they were 650Mb floppy discs. They can also create CD-R discs.

A downside is that CD-RW discs can't be read by all CD-ROM drives, only the more recent MultiRead and DVD drives; all CD players, both PC and hi-fi, can read CD-R discs.

All CD-R and CD-RW kits come with basic software to get you started. The most common is Adaptec Easy CD Creator, although there's a swag of extra features with the Easy CD Creator Deluxe version 3.5 for Windows (about $180) or Adaptec's cutely named Toast and Jam CD authoring products for the Mac. As with Easy CD Creator Deluxe, Toast (about $180) does both data and audio CDs, although musicians and audio professionals are best served by the high-end (about $600) Jam 2.5 software.

You can learn more at www.adaptec.com/products/solutions/cdrec.html