CDBurn support

During the many years of CDBurn's existence, support for customers and hopefully-soon-customers has taken an ever increasing slice of my free time (which is also CDBurn's development time).

To reduce the time needed for support issues, this website was created. Before contacting me or Warm Silence Software, please look around and see if your question has already been answered.

The Manual

CDBurn's manual was often criticised for being too technical, and there is probably some truth in that. But the manual should nevertheless be the first stop when questions arise.

The manual is currently undergoing a major revision. In the meantime, you can download the old manual in several formats. The Impression format manual was done by Brian Carroll, and it should give a nice manual when printed in pamphlet mode. For those without Impression, several PostScript versions are available, printable via GhostScript, Riscript Pro or any PostScript capable printer.

• Original text version
• Impression version
• PostScript pamphlet 2up version
• PostScript 2up straigth version
• PostScript straight single page version

Frequently asked questions

During support, it became clear soon that CD writing is a complicated issue with a lot of factors to be considered. Here you can read the most frequently asked (and answered ;-)) questions.

Mailing List

Our preferred support medium is the CDBurn mailing list (hosted by Smartgroups). Via Smartgroups' web interface, you can easily read back past topics of discussion. The mailing list has also the advantage of bringing together the developer with many customers at the same time. Especially customer experience about a range of drives or media has always been found valuable.

To visit (and possibly join) the wss-cdburn mailing list on Smartgroups, click on the following link:

The mailing list is a medium both for current customers and for people generally interested in buying CDBurn.

The configurable driver

Since version 1.59, CDBurn features a configurable MMC driver. Configuration is currently via a cryptic file interface, i.e. if you want to create a driver for your specific CD Writer, you need to create a text file describing the driver features.

This textfile describes how to create such a driver.

Useful 3rd party software

This is a selection of software written by other people that might be useful or even essential in conjunction with CDBurn.

Commercial/Semi commercial stuff

• CDROMFS - a powerful, stable and fast CDFS replacement which is able to read Joliet discs, comes with a vastly improved CDFSFiler, can read some UDF discs, is much more compatible with recent CD standards like CD Extra, fixes all the braindead CDFS bugs, properly supports MimeMap... in short, it is the ideal companion for CDBurn, and costs only 35 UKP. Buy now. Immediately.

• WavEdit is a powerful tool to manipulate WAV files (such as those used and produced by CDBurn) directly on disc in a variety of ways, including volume manipulation and fade-in/fade-outs. WavEdit is shareware.

• ProSound/StudioSound are really "ex commercial" pieces of software to manipulate any kinds of sound and music in nearly any way. Once sold by Oregan Developments, they are now available for free. Bugfixed versions of ProSound along with a tutorial are available here.

Free stuff

• Various stuff by Roger Darlington. Mainly MP3 related, and mostly IYONIX pc compatible. Including a nice piece of software to convert MP3 files into WAV files suitable for CDBurn

• MP32WAV by David Chapman is a nice frontend to convert MP3s to WAV files which CDBurn can then use for Audio CDs. It uses AMPlayer as its backend for MP3 decoding.

• CDFSSoftPower by Gary Partis is a freely-available CDFS driver for SCSI-2 compliant CD-ROMs. It is the same piece of software that is also used in the Power-tec SCSI products.

• SoundCon by Rick Hudson is a universal sound format conversion utility. It is handy to convert WAV files that CDBurn does not recognize into the standard CDBurn WAV format. It can also be used for playback, but this is not recommended for users with 16bit sound - please use PlayIt/PlaySound instead.

• PlayIt, again by Rick Hudson, is a sample playing module that copes with nearly every hardware (8/16bit Acorn standard, CC Lark) and many sound formats. It is used by quite a lot of programs to provide sound playback, so there are quite a few nice frontends available like...

• AnnoWave, by...you guessed it...Rick Hudson. AnnoWave is a WAV file annotation editor. Some software is able to display those annotations (e.g. PlayIt/PlaySound, and hopefully soon CDBurn). Handy to store author/performer/title data directly inside the sound file.

• PlaySound by Mark Scholes. Uses PlayIt as its core playing module and is generally a nice frontend for sample playing.

• AMPlayer is an MP3 playing module. Or to be more precise, it is a whole distribution of the core MP3 playing modules optimized for various processors/computers, an example frontend and a heap of tools. The AmpApp command line decoders can be used to decode MP3 files into WAV files that CDBurn can handle.

• DigitalCD by André Timmermans is the ultimate sound player for RISC OS. It plays not only various sample formats, but also MP3 files and a lot of tracker-style formats like MOD, Digital Symphony, Matrix and ArcTracker. It can also control Audio CD playback. It is fully skinnable and supports playlists.

• DataPlayer by John Duffell is a minimalistic sample player for CD format samples on your harddrive. It uses a minimum amount of system resources to achieve CD quality playback on even the slowest machines capable of 16bit sound output.

• SampleCD by Paul Wilkinson is a tool to extract audio data digitally with a suitable CD-ROM and a CDFS driver supporting the CD_ReadAudio command. It comes with a nice frontend and is able to do a limited amount of "anti-jittering".

• ReadAudio by me is a crude BASIC utility to do much the same as SampleCD does, but without relying on CDFS or the CDFS driver. There is also a frontend available.

• AudioFS2 by Jonathan Hunt is, again, capable of extracting digital audio data from your CD-ROM. If there is CDFS support of course. Included here because it has an interesting approach for the user interface.

• CD Simulator by Andy Armstrong is a brilliant little module that is basically a CDFS driver for ISO9660 files on your harddisc. This means that without writing a CD, you can easily see what CDFS does to your data. It even allows you to use special speed files to simulate the access times of different CD-ROM drives. This module is distributed with CDBurn inside "FakeCD", which is a simple-to-use frontend that recognizes dragged ISO files on the CDFaker-controlled CDFS drive to mount them automatically. Note that CDROMFS has this facility built in, because it implements an Image Filing System for ISO files.

• mkisofs is an early port of the well-known ISO9660 formatter from the Unix world, extended to be able to add RISC OS style CDFS extensions. This port was done when there was no inbuilt ISO formatter in CDBurn. Peter Naulls has now ported the latest version to RISC OS as part of his Unix Porting Project - this is nice to e.g. add El Torrito style bootblocks to CDs, something that CDBurn is not capable of.

• PatchCDFS by David O'Shea patches RISC OS 4 CDFS so that it supports RockRidge style filenames and no longer uppercases every filename it encounters. This patch is also available as a handy ROMpatch via Darren Salt's collection of RISC OS 4 patches.