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Until recently, CD recording had been a professional's pursuit. However, as CD recorder prices have plummeted, CD-R media prices reached dirt-cheap prices, and CD-R software becomes easy to use, anyone can produce CDs. Much of the activity is directed towards audio recording (See Tutorial – Digital Audio) but the inherent usefulness of CD-R applies to a wide range of applications.

This is a general Tutorial for making any CD.

CD Creation Software

The most popular software for creating CDs are:

Neither software is free. The software helps arrange your files and directories that make up the Virtual Image on your hard drive that will be written to the CD.

File naming

Naming files is an important part of making a CD. If you don’t use accepted conventions, you will be stuck with names that look like "Progra~1." There are two conventions and you will need to set your software to one convention or the other:

Joliet for Win95/98 which allows you to write names up to 64 characters

Romeo for Win95/98 and NT and Macintosh which allows you to write names up to 128 characters

Not all CDs can be read by all operating systems. Much depends on the file system and naming convention used to create the CD. This becomes very important if the CD is to be read by more than one operating system. For more. http://mcdbnt.lscf.ucsb.edu/mcdbcomputer/cdr/cdrecfilename.htm

Sessions

CD-Rs are written in single operation (called a session). You can interrupt your write session and add more later but you cannot use the disc until it is complete. A CD that allows multiple write sessions is called a multi-session.