February 11 -- Making a CD Disk

CD-ROM recorders have become quite affordable now, and offer lots of possibilities.

Their features include:

• Cheap media (less than $2 per disk)
• Good capacity (over 600 MB per disk)
• Inexpensive recorder (roughly $300)
• Ubiquitous readers (almost any computer can read a CD)

These features make the recorders useful for the following tasks:

• Backups (competitive with tape for price per byte, but much more accessible)
• Archiving 1 (the disk cannot be erased or overwritten, which makes the records auditable)
• Archiving 2 (the disks are long-lived compared to tape, floppies, Zip, Jaz, or whatever)
• Saving large files (images, music, short animations)
• Making HTML-based slide shows or presentations that you can play on any computer that has a web browser and CD reader (which means almost any modern computer)
• Making custom music CDs to play on your audio CD player

We will use a CD-recorder to do some of these tasks and demonstrate some of the issues of making CDs.

I use my recorder a lot: my experience is similar to when I got a copier. I thought that I would need only a little bit of media (paper for the copier, CD-R blanks for the recorder), but once I got it I found it got much heavier use than anticipated.

Examples of unexpected uses of the CD-recorder include:

• My sister needed some historic family pictures for publication by the historical society where she lives. I made a CD and mailed it to her -- she can read it, the society can read it, and the pictures are detailed enough for publication. A Zip or Jaz disk was out of the question because neither she nor they had a Zip or Jaz drive, and anyway the media for Zip or Jaz costs many times more than a CD-R blank.
• I have some music CDs that I like, but each has one or more tracks that I am not especially fond of. So I made a CD with the tracks I wanted in the order I wanted.
• My father-in-law has taken thousands of pictures, and his father took a lot also. I made a web-based family photo album that any family member can access readily. But the pictures are on a CD, because having them on the web was so slow. Why not have it all on the CD and skip the web altogether? Come and find out!

I hope you bring questions so we cover the topics you are interested in.

Remember, the meetings are free and open to the public. Please bring a friend.