When is a disk not a disk?

I admit I have always been confused about saving to a CD. This is an embarrassing admission since I am supposed to be fairly computer literate. Every time I've needed to save something to a CD, I've managed to mess around until I accomplished the task, but I've never really understood CD-Rs, CD-RWs, what is compatible with what, and why the error messages I get while I am messing around happen.

I recently found a great website that does take pains to explain things. It is www.cdrfaq.org
by Andy McFadden. It was originally a Usenet newsgroup. It is pretty technical but I came away with some important learnings (that are probably pretty obvious to the techno savvy).

First and most importantly, CD-Roms are NOT just like floppy disks. They have very specific limitations. You need special software to use a CD like a floppy. Roxio is an example.

With more traditional software (like the built-in burner in Windows XP where you use the "Send To" function and select CD drive X), you collect the files in a staging area and then burn them all at once by clicking on the CD drive and "writing the files". This burns the data onto a single track and then the disk is ejected (http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpcd.php) This creates files that can be read on a broad range of computers but CANNOT be updated. It cannot be used for backup where files are overwritten repeatedly.

Burning audio files is a different deal altogether. Using Windows Media player, you can burn audiofiles to a CD in one operation. But once you do, you can never write to that disk again. What is on there for the first burn is it.

Now, to use a CD more like a floppy, you need a CD-RW, and special software (like Roxio--also called Drag and Drop) that allows you to format the disk into "packets" or tracks. You have to format the disk in advance and this may take a very long time depending upon the speed of the CD drive and the size of the disk. 45 minutes may not be unusual. To format the CD-RW, it needs to be completely blank so if you've used it before, you'll have to use the erase function (do not use "quick erase") before you format it.

Another tip is that you must let the writer complete the operation for the disk to be usable. If you take the disk out before the software is done writing , you have ruined the disk. If it is a CD-RW, you may be able to erase it and start over.

As you see, this stuff is pretty complicated, and it will be difficult for us as librarians to help our patrons through this maze. I suspect that unless the CD technology gets more user-friendly pretty fast, it will prove to be a dead-end. Already, many patrons have switched to memory sticks which behave just like another C: drive.

I'll try to place other tips about burning CDs on the blog as I learn the ins and outs of this technology. In the mean time, I would suggest to patrons that they invest in a memory stick.