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Using the Mac CD burning station in the expansion lab, you can easily create a CD using most of the common CD formats. This documents covers the most common: single platform, cross platform (hybrid), and audio. Making a single platform CD is the simplest option. The main advantage of creating a single platform disc - either Mac only or Windows (ISO) only - is speed. For single platform discs, it is generally not necessary to copy the files before making your CD. To create a CD that is readable on both platforms (i.e. cross platform), however, you must copy all the Mac files to a volume before making a CD. Copying the files can take quite a while. Audio CDs are very straightforward and only general information is included here.
Table of Contents
Cross Platform CDs1. Turn on the CD writer (if it is not already on).
2. Run Toast 3.5.2 from the Toast 3 folder on Local HD.
3. If you are burning a Macintosh only disk, choose "Mac Files & Folders" from the Format menu. If you are burning a Windows only disk, choose "ISO 9660" from the Format menu.
4. Click on the button "Data..." in the Toast Window, then click "New CD".
5. Double-click on "Untitled CD" and give the disk a name. Short names are generally good.
6. (Windows - ISO 9660 CDs only) Click on the "Settings" tab. The "Naming:" pop up list should be set for "Joliet (MS-DOS + Windows 95)". Windows 3.1 and Softimage users or the curious may want to read more about this.
7. Press "Done".
8. Toast is now prepared for you to specify the files you want to put on the CD. Drag whatever files and folders you want on your CD onto the Window. (or you can use the "Add..." button in the Data window from step 4)
9. (optional) You can verify the layout of the files on the CD by pressing "Data...". When you are ready, return to the main toast screen by pressing "Done".
10. (optional) Press "Check Speed..." to verify everything is configured OK. Wait a minute or two and if everything is green, you're OK. If something shows up red, check the troubleshooting section.
11. Put a blank CD-R into caddy. Insert the caddy face-up (clear side) with the arrow facing forward as shown on caddy.
12. Everything should now be ready. Press "Write CD..." to begin. Press "Write Session" or "Write Disc".
13. After the disc has been written, by default Toast will verify the disc. You can skip this verification process if you are in a hurry.
14. (strong advised) Immediately after the disk is finished, take the disc to a machine and test it. If you can open the disc and see the files, the contents will be ok 99% of the time. If you want to be very thorough, open some of your documents and verify they look ok.
15. Unless someone is waiting to burn a disk after you, quit toast and turn off the CD writer.
Making a cross platform disk is somewhat more complicated than a single platform disk. This procedure below assume that you want the exact files appear on the Mac and ISO discs. For more advanced cross platform discs, consult with the lab monitor or Paul.
Before you can begin making the hybrid CD, you need to prepare a volume for your data.
Once all of your data has been copied to the temporary volume, you can follow the slightly modified single platform procedure shown below.1. Turn on the CD writer (if it is not already on).
2. Run Toast 3.5.2 from the Toast 3 folder on Local HD.
3. Choose "Create Temporary Partition..." from the Utilities menu.
4. Enter a name for the disk and select 'CDR Temp' in the "ON:" field.
5. If there isn't enough space on 'CDR Temp':
i. cancel out of the Temporary Partition dialog,
ii. select all the files on 'CDR Temp' and throw them in the trash,
iii. then empty the trash and repeat step 3.6. After you create a temporary partition, you will see an icon on the desktop with the name you entered in step 4. This icon is like an alias to temporary partition you just created and acts like a standard Macintosh volume. From here on out, this volume will be referred to as the temporary volume. It is NOT the same as the image file (ex. MyCD•image) that was created on CDR Temp. Do not confuse the image file with the temporary volume.
7. Copy all your files from the server, zip cartridge, or any other source to this temporary volume.
Audio CDs8. Choose "Mac/ISO Hybrid" from the Format menu.
9. While in Toast, drag and drop the temporary volume onto the toast window. After you let go, your volume's name should have replaced "(Drop a volume here)".
10. Click on the "ISO..." button.
11. Drag and drop the temporary volume onto the "ISO 9660" window.
12. (optional) Double click on the CD icon in this window if you to give the CD a different name.
13. Click on the "Settings" tab. The "Naming:" pop up list should be set for "Joliet (MS-DOS + Windows 95)". Windows 3.1 and Softimage users or the curious may want to read more about this.
14. Verify that the bottom of the ISO 9660 window says there is 'shared data.' If not, something is wrong with configuration. Otherwise, things are set.
15. (optional) Press "Check Speed..." to verify everything is configured OK. Wait a minute or two and if everything is green, you're OK. If something shows up red, check the troubleshooting section.
16. Put a blank CD-R into caddy. Insert the caddy face-up (clear side) with the arrow facing forward as shown on caddy.
17. Everything should now be ready. Press "Write CD..." to begin. Press "Write Session" or "Write Disc".
18. After the disc has been written, by default Toast will verify the disc. You can skip this verification process if you are in a hurry.
19. (strong advised) Immediately after the disk is finished, take the disc to a machine and test it. If you can open the disc and see the files, the contents will be ok 99% of the time. If you want to be very thorough, open some of your documents and verify they look ok.
20. Unless someone is waiting to burn a disk after you, quit toast and turn off the CD writer.
You can make a regular music CD by using the option "Audio CD" from the format menu. This disk will play in virtually any standard CD player, although some players do have problems with CD-Rs.
You can also add audio tracks to a Mac, ISO, MAC / ISO hybrid disk by choosing "Audio Tracks" from the format menu. The computer data portion of such a disk will show up as Track #1 in a CD player. Playing this track will produce loud static-like noise and the standard industry disclaimer is that this can damage your stereo system. Be careful!
For either method, each track should be saved seperately as a 44 kHz, 16-bit Stereo AIFF sound file.
Where to buy and What media to use
The ASUCLA Computer Store sells a 74 minute CD-R for around five bucks. Not a bad price, but prices closer to two bucks are not hard to find at CompUSA, Fry's, Creative Computers in Santa Monica, or your favorite computer vendor. Be willing to buy packs of 5 or 10 at a time; you'll save money. If you split it with friends, buying in packs of 50 or more can mean prices near $1 each. When buying mail order, be sure the CD-R comes with a jewel case (if you want one). It's also nice when the discs have no logo and some kind of textured (sometimes called 'printable') surface to write on, but it's not essential. Don't worry about the brand of disc - there are only 5 or 6 actual manufacturers and they're all pretty much the same.
How Long It Takes
Burning a full 650 Mb CD (or an audio CD with 74 minutes of music) takes 40 minutes without verification. That does not include setup or copy time. Copying times vary widely, but an average 100 Mb copy from Rodin takes about 7 minutes. If you are burning less than 650 Mb, you can calculate the burn time by dividing the amount of data that will be on your CD (in minutes) by two and then adding 2 minutes. In other words, (time in minutes / 2) + 2 = burn time (in minutes). Toast shows the amount of data in minutes in the data window.
How to label these things
The best way to label a disc is with a Sharpie® permanent marker. If you use a printed label system like the Neato, please do not use our laser or inkjet printers to print the labels. They can jam and cause damage to our printer.
Each time you write to a CD-R, you create a session. If you choose Write Session, you can later come back and write to that same CD-R again. If you choose Write Disc, Toast writes the disc in such a way that you cannot record another session to that cd. If you do write additional sessions to a CD, you do not alter the data already on the CD. Instead, you just create another volume on the disk. The limit to the number of times you can do this is space on the CD-R. In addition to the space taken by your data, each session uses about 17Mb (or 2 minutes) of space on the disc. Pretty straightforward except:
When you insert your finished CD into a Mac, the initial look of the CD will be determined by the desktop at the time the CD was burned. The desktop stores things like the window size, the layout of the icons, whether they are icons, small icons, list view, etc. It is suggested you arrange at least the CD's root level to be most presentable for your project. For instance, you have a director project with external sounds, QuickTime® movies, linked casts or multiple director movies. You should size the window so that the main projector stands out. This makes your project easier to use and more professional looking. Also, position the upper-left corner of the window towards the upper-left corner of the monitor. This will insure your window is initially visible when your CD is used on computers with smaller monitors.
On Mac, whatever icon you give to the temporary volume will be assigned to the CD. Create an icon in your favorite graphics program and copy it onto the clipboard. Then, you can change the icon for the volume by clicking once on the icon in the Finder, and choosing "Get Info..." from the File menu, and then choosing Paste from the Edit menu.
On the PC, the CD icon is assigned by the autorun.inf file on the CD. If you want to display a custom CD icon, create a file at the root level of the CD called 'autorun.inf'. That file should contain the following lines:
[AutoRun]
open=
icon=iconname.ico
You can put the icon file anywhere on the CD. For instance, you might try to put it out of the way in a folder. To do this, include the path (i.e. icon=data\iconname.ico) Also, you can refer to an icon that is embedded within an application on your CD. The format for that would then be:
[AutoRun]
open=
icon=myapplication.exe,2
where 2 is the icon resources' number. If there is only one icon in the file, the number would be zero.
Windows 95 Autoplay
The Windows portion of the icon discussion above actually uses the Autoplay feature built into Windows 95 and Windows NT. If you would like to have your CD run a splash application like you see with other CDs, use the "open=" line of the autorun.ini file. The Microsoft User Interface Guide talks about how to fully use this feature. Basically, keep this splash application as small as possible and do not write any files to the user's hard drive without permission. Some people have successfully used a Director projector for this purpose. I suggest you experiment with your projector to verify its responsiveness. Also, the academic version of Director we have installed at CDA will put up an ugly splash screen of its own. That makes Director a poor choice for this unless you have access to a commercial version of Director. If you don't want to go this route, the kind folks at Leverage Data Systems have made publicly available a simple autoplay application they wrote. It isn't perfect, but it does a provide a free, quick way of adding additional professional polish to your CD. If you know of a better product, let me know.
The step by step instructions at the beginning of this document assume you plan to use the ISO 9660 portion of your CD exclusively on Windows 95/NT systems. With that assumption made, the correct naming system to use is Joliet. However, file naming becomes more complex if you need to support Windows 3.1x computers. Using Joliet, Windows 3.1x will see a truncated version of the filenames (so-called 8 dot 3 names) that you see in Windows 95/NT. This will usually cause problems for any application expecting the long filename seen in Windows 95/NT. If you do need to support Windows 3.1x, it is highly recommended you make all your filenames 8 dot 3. (ex. shortnam.txt, tiny.dir, etc)
It is critical that SoftImage users backing up their databases use the Joliet file naming system. Any other option will leave you with databases that are unusable.
If you are making a single platform disc and your work is actually on multiple zip cartridges (or any other kind of removable storage), you will not be able to follow the single platform procedure. You will need to make use of a temporary partition. Creating a temporary partition is discussed in steps 1-7 of the cross platform procedure.
What to do with a Bad CD-R
This most important question is answered quite clearly in the McFadden FAQ.
If something is in the red during the the speed check, it means the current system configuration is slow enough to prevent Toast from making a clean burn. If everything you are burning is in a temporary partition on CDR Temp, try rebooting the machine while holding down shift. After the system has rebooted, try again. If that still doesn't work, consult with the lab monitor.
Toast freezes when adding ISO files to a hybrid disk
Toast seems to have problems when you drag and drop too many ISO files at once. Too many files is generally anything over 1000. To fix this, try copying smaller increments (i.e. drag a folder at a time). If that doesn't work, do a ISO-only disk instead of a hybrid. If that isn't possible or still doesn't work, punt.
If you want to do something more advanced than this document discusses, consult with Paul or Maroun. If you would like to make suggestions about how this HowTo might be more helpful, contact Paul. If you want to learn everything there is to know about CD writing, look at Andy McFadden's FAQ.