SimpleCDR-X 0.92.2 by John Tobin			September 5, 2001
Homepage: http://ogre.rocky-road.net/cdr.shtml
E-mail: ogre@sirinet.net
AOL IM: ogre7929

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Compilation and Execution
3. Known Issues
4. Main Window
5. Setup
6. Audio CD Mastering
7. Data CD Mastering
8. CD Ripping and Audio Compresson
9. CD Copying
10. Bug Reporting
11. Closing
12. Credits



1. Introduction

Thank you for choosing to download SimpleCDR-X. The primary goal of SimpleCDR-X is to be a powerful CD creation and audio maniplation program. Ease of use, flexibilty, and a clean interface of of utmost importance. SimpleCDR-X achieves this by not having the option to enable every single mkisofs and cdrecord option. Instead a small selection of commonly used options are available. In no way does this compromise the power of SimpleCDR-X because a majority of the options you will never use or know about unless you have the man page printed out for quick reference.

SimpleCDR-X makes use of many common CD and audio manipulation tools, namely CDRecord and its accompanying programs, CDRDAO for Disc at Once copying, CD Paranoia, Blade Encode, LAME, OGG Vorbis, MAD MPEG Audio Decoder, and mpg123. SimpleCDR-X also supports on-the-fly CD ripping to MP3 or OGG Vorbis format with no intermediate WAV files.



2.

Compilation is quite easy, run 

	./configure
	make
	make install
	simplecdrx

and you should be looking at the SimpleCDR-X main window, provided the install directory is in your path.

The configure script will detect if you have the files necessary to install the support for OGG Vorbis time estimation in Audio CD Mastering and compile it in if you have it.

If you should have problems with the configure script adn get an error such as "AM_PATH_GTK not found" or something similar check /usr/share/aclocal and if gtk.m4 is not there check /usr/local/share/aclocal and see if it exists. If it exists under /usr/local/share/aclocal then link it to /usr/share/aclocal with a command like this "ln -s /usr/local/share/aclocal/gtk.m4 /usr/share/aclocal/gtk.m4" This should only be a problem if you have installed GTK in /usr/local instead of /usr where every normal Linux user has it.


3. Known Issues

There shouldn't be much of anything wrong with the program itself, I took great care to get it right the first time and had testers giving me feedback on what was working and what wasn't. I also tested it rigorously myself.

One thing that may strke someone as strange is that in Data CD Mastering when a directory is imported every one of the subdirectories is shown. It is that way currently because for ease of writings sake I didn't want to put in a tree type view yet, I will in the future.

4. Main Window

If all has gone well for you so far and I hope that it has you should be looking at the main window and see a SimpleCDR graphic, the provided AS-IS message and a Copyright message.

From here you can see the tabs on the side to access all of the program's functions. First you want to go to Setup and configure your system. Audio CD take you to Audio CD Mastering, Data CD takes you to Data CD Mastering, CD Ripping takes you to CD Ripping and Audio compression, Copy CD take you to CD copying, and Setup takes you to Setup.



5. Setup 

This should be your first stop, otherwise nothing will work at all. Customize each of the settings to your particular preference and hit the big Save button. You must hit save in order to apply the changes. That saves a configuration file in $HOME/.simplecdr/cdr.conf. Most of the options should be self-explanatory, if you look at the options and don't know what to do becuase you have an ATAPI CD-RW and CD-ROM, don't fear. Linux has a neat feature called SCSI Emulation that makes Linux look at your ATAPI drives like it is a SCSI device. For further information on SCSI Emulation please see the CD-Writing-HOWTO available from http://www.linuxdoc.org or packaged with you distribution. 

The custom cdrecord options field is for entering drive specific options such as burn-proof.



6. Audio CD Mastering

Ahh, Audio CD Mastering, my favorite thing to do with my CDRW.

The Import Playlist option will let you take an XMMS or Winamp playlist and load that as your track listing.

Rip and Add will rip a track from a CD into the track listing.

Add OGG/MP3/WAV selects one or more audio files at a time. Click cancel on the file selection window when done.

Delete removes a track from the list.

Play CD Track plays a cd from your reader as defined in setup.

Burn CD burns the CD. When you click Burn CD another window pops up with a few options. Normalize volume will make all of the music files to be written have the same amplitude, simulate burn does just what it says, and FIFO Size is the amount of system memory to buffer your burner's buffer. Doubling your burner's buffer is a good rule for what size to choose.

Delete All/Clean Up clears the track list and deletes any wav files that were ripped to the hard drive.



7. Data CD Mastering

First off when adding anything make sure to select a directory from the directory list. Other wise stuff will go where you don't want it.

The method of filename storage is a dynamic array, that means that when you add files the memory usage will continue to grow, this shouldn't be a problem on modern computers, but if you decided that you want to add "/" and try to overflow your memory don't say I didn't warn you.

Create New directory makes a brand new directory.

Add Directory Contents adds the contents of a directory's root path into the currently selected directory.

Add Directory adds the directory itself to the selected directory.

Add file adds a file to the selected directory.

Remove file removes the selected file.

Remove directory removes the selected directory and its contents.

Load saved image loads a text file with a listing of files that you want in the cd that you saved with this program. don't attempt to load an iso image as you might overflow your memory.

Save Image creates a text file list of the files and directories to add to be loaded with Load saved image.

Burn Image opens up another window with burn options. The ISO type is the type of filesystem to burn to the CD, Rockridge is the standard Unix CD extension format and Joliet is the standard windows CD extension format. Single Session is if you only want to write to the disc once, First Session is if this is going to be the first session of a cd that you might want to add to later, second session or greater means that you have already written one session or more to the CD. When you are burning Multisession CDs the ISO type is overridden with Rockridge only. Similate burn is self-explanatory and FIFO size is the amount of system memory to be used to buffer the CDRW's internal buffer. Burn!!! commences writing and abort aborts.

Blank CDRW blanks a CDRW disc, Fast just deletes enough stuff on the CD to let you write to it again and All(slow) destroys all data on the disk, this takes as long as your burner takes to write a full CD.

Remove All/Clean Up clears the list and erased the contents from memory. 

Calculate size uses stat() from /sys/stat.h to determine the total size of the entire file list. This will actually work unlike mkisofs.

One additional note, in the file listings, if you need to see farther over to the right, use the scroll bar at the bottom and scroll all the way right, then go up to the right side of the bar that says Path and file name or Directory and you can drag than further right to see more.


8. CD Ripping and Audio Compression

Most everything here should be self-explanatory.



9. Copy CD

Copy Audio CD uses your selected ripper and rips all tracks from one CD to the Hard drive and then writes them back with cdrecord.

Copy Data CD with mkisofs/cdrecord attempts to mount a disc in the source drive an create an image from it.

Copy Data CD with CDRDAO will copy a CD in Disc at Once mode from source drive to the burner. I will add an on-the-fly option soon. This method is preferred over using mkisofs and cdrecord.

To burn a pre-made ISO image, select the file and then hit burn and wait.

Simulate does just what it says.

This menu will be enhanced with more options in the future.



10. Bug Reporting

Should you find a bug which is quite possible please contact me as soon as possible. It is hard to make software perfect and the more users contribute to the debugging process the better software becomes. Also remember some systems will have problems when others don't. If you are having problems I am more that willing to help you try to resolve the issue.



11. Closing

I again thank you for selecting my program. It has been a lot of hard work getting to this point with SimpleCDR-X. Almost 2 months of constant work in my free time while juggling school and work at the same time. All I can say is that if Glade, the GTK GUI builder, did not exist I'm not sure if SimpleCDR-X would be a reality today. Glade is an outstanding program. It took most of the drudge work out of making a 2200 line interface.



12. Credits

There are quite a few people that I would like to thank that helped make SimpleCDR-X develop so rapidly and make it such a robust appliction.

Chris Winquist, my long time friend, he wrote the dynamic array for the file listing.

Cedric Tefft <cedric@earthling.net> Author of MP3info which is tied to SimpleCDR-X for MP3 time retreival.

Thomas Niederreiter <tn@xcdroast.org> Author of X-CDRoast, his help and code from X-CDRoast helped to get the progress monitoring done.

Damon Chaplin The creator of Glade.

The author of the XCave wine manager, I looked at this program as a guide when I was first learning Glade and GTK. I wish I could find his name but the entire page is in French.

My testing crew:
David Brennan
Edward Loeb III
jredburn@xxxxxx.edu
Jim Bivans
Licht Macher
Robert robert@xxxxxx.au
Suzy Williams
Wayne Topa
alzzamud@xxxxxx.net










