FAQ for X-CD-Roast 0.98 alpha 9

Updated: Jan 18 2002

Overview:

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 my harddrives/CD-Burner/CD-ROMs?

X-CD-Roast 0.96e had limited ATAPI-device support. But this was just a quick hack and I had a lot of complaints that the code detected devices wrong. So I decided to remove ANY ATAPI/IDE-code from X-CD-Roast. And there is really absolutely no reason why you need it anyway. Direct support of partitions and harddisks is gone, so you never need to see devices of this kind in X-CD-Roast.

But in order to write a CD, X-CD-Roast must of course detect your CD-Writer. If you have a SCSI-Writer there should never be a problem. All you need is generic-scsi support in the kernel. ATAPI/IDE-Writers need scsi-emulation to be detected and accessable. You have to install scsi-emulation for ALL your ATAPI-CDROM drives too, if you want to use them within X-CD-Roast. Parallel-Writers need the parallelport-driver in the kernel.

Please see section 2 of the CD-Writing-HOWTO how to configure your kernel on Linux.

If you use not Linux but any other OS, you have to check the cdrecord documentation how to access your writer.

Additional note about configuring SCSI-emulation in Linux:

The HOWTO does not explain how to add more than one ATAPI device to SCSI-emulation like may be needed for X-CD-Roast. The trick are these two lines (Examples only!!):

Line for /etc/modules.conf

options ide-cd ignore='hdc hdd'

Line for /etc/lilo.conf

append="hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi"

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-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda6 ide-scsi=/dev/hdc ide-scsi=/dev/hdd

Note:
I got a report that if the line above does not work with your grub.conf you can try this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda6 hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi

3. Why is there no more direct partition support in the new X-CD-Roast?

Partition support was introduced in X-CD-Roast about 3 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 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!

The current release of X-CD-Roast 0.98 is just a test release. I did not intend that it is easy to install. Only users who are able to get it running should run it. If you can't run it, then you have to wait for the final release, where all installation issues will be adressed.

If you are running linux and get errors about some missing include files or gtk-config not found, you forgot to install all the needed packages from your distribution CD. Please see the README file.

6. I think I found a bug! How do I report it to you?

If you think you found a bug (please don't write about "missing" features - remember this test shows only about 50% of the final product) 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.

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. Its very easy because there are only two ASCII-files (language.def and langhelp.def) which contain all texts. Please contact me first and I will send you further instructions. I only need people which are reliable and can react on short notice when there are some texts to change. As official maintainer for your language you will be added to the X-CD-Roast Hall-of-Fame.

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 at the end of 2001.

9. The CDDB-lookup does not work! Why?

Current CDDB-code does not support CDDB via HTTP and proxies. So when you are behind a firewall you cannot lookup your CD-titles. I will add proxy support when I am really bored someday.

10. Will there be multisession and bootable CD support?

Yes. This is the main-reason for the 0.98 release. I will try to support all mkisofs-features in X-CD-Roast. Please be patient - its not trivial to create a GUI for all this.

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.

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, which gave me a CD-R/RW MP7060S, a DVD/CDRW MP9120 and a MP7125A
  • SANYO, which gave me a CRD-RW1, a CD-R CRD-R800S, a CRD-BP2 and CRD-BP1300P
  • SONY, which gave me a CRX-140S
Also thanks to Netplace 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)

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 0.98alpha8 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.

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?

Indeed is writing CD-Text not yet supported. X-CD-Roast can read CD-Text fine and we have to wait until cdrecord includes that feature to write CD-Text.

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 usual computers.
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.

Any FAQ I forgot? Please contact me...

18.07.2001 T.Niederreiter (tn@xcdroast.org)