Some goodies for your CD burner

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a really long time! Everyone and his uncle who has no clue how CD burners work wants a networked CD burner, for some reason. But it’s not as easy as just throwing the drive in a server and sharing it out with write access, as you probably know.
Leave it to someone else to think of combining the power of CGI scripts and the Unix command line to create a Web-based networked CD burning solution. So with this and a minimalist PC (any Pentium with 24 megs of RAM and a 1-gig hard drive ought to be more than enough) and a Linux-compatible CD burner, you can give controlled access to a CD burner to anyone on your network with a Web browser. It’ll even burn bootable CD-ROMs for you.

So now I’m half tempted to permanently install my 2X CD burner in my 486 so that any of my computers can use it, any time.

Speaking of bootable CDs… I’ve mentioned Bart’s way to create bootable CD-ROMs before, but it warrants another mention. Bookmark it. Bart Lagerweij has a great collection of boot floppies as well, and some good utilities, including low-level SCSI utilities.

Windows CD burning software. So you got a great deal on an OEM CD-R or CD-RW only to find it didn’t include software? What to do? You re-use the copy of Easy CD Creator that came with your old CD-R, that’s what. And then you’ll upgrade Windows and you’ll really regret that–Easy CD Creator is one of the most finicky programs I’ve ever seen about Windows versions. Upgrade Windows, you’ll have to buy a new version of Easy CD Creator. So if you’re smart, you’ll tell Roxio where to go and what to do with itself and buy Nero Burning ROM.

If you’re smart and cheap, you’ll pay this site (watch out for the annoying popups and popunders, sorry) a visit. It’s free CD burning software for Windows, based on GNU tools. It comes with dated versions of cdrecord, so you’ll want to download a newer version of CDRTools (current version as I write is 1.10; v1.11 is pre-release code so you use it at your own risk) and extract it to the directory you installed the front-end.

It’s not as flashy as the commercial tools and it doesn’t necessarily have all the features you’ll find in a retail shrink-wrap package, but it’s functional, and some people will find it easier to use. It happily runs on any 32-bit Windows. You can make as many copies of it as you want and install it anywhere you want. It’s legal, and much less invasive than the commercial tools. Good deal.

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One thought on “Some goodies for your CD burner

  • February 1, 2003 at 11:05 am
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    I was looking for this yesterday.

    This is a GREAT tool.

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