Preliminarily manual for X-CD-Roast 0.98alpha15 ----------------------------------------------- *** Please see the file "FAQ" for further information. *** There is also an online manual at: http://www.xcdroast.org/manual A PDF-version of that manual is available as the file "xcdroast-manual.pdf". Thanks to James C. Geneva for the conversion. This file only states some very basic usage of X-CD-Roast. I put a lot of effort in making this release "fool-proof". After you installed and started X-CD-Roast (see README) you are prompted to enter the setup-menu. All buttons and controls provide tooltip (bubble) help, when you rest the mousepointer more than 2 seconds above it. This should help you in most cases. Options greyed out are currently not implemented. These will come in future snapshots. Please see the FAQ how to setup your devices. You are strongly encouraged to install scsi-emulation (on linux) because the direct ATAPI support of the linux 2.4.x kernels causes a lot of problems. In setup you have to specify at least one image-directory. Pick all directories you want to store images in and put them in the image-partition-list in the HD-Setup. You can only add exactly one directory on each physical partition on your drive. (This makes it easier to calculate the available disk space.) When you have more than one image-directory you can tell X-CD-Roast to add all the space in them to store much more data as possible with only one directory. X-CD-Roast will distribute all read tracks automatically to the available directory in case it would run out of space otherwise. However, it won't break up big images - so a 600 MB image cannot stored when you have 400 MB free in one directory and 500 MB free in the other. You will get a "disk full"-warning when you try to start to read the track. On the other hand an audio-disk with 10 tracks needing about 70 MB disk space each can stored easily. The first 5 tracks would fit it the first directory and the other 5 in the second. Sounds complicated, but it actually very easy and quite a nice feature. You may now wonder how you know where the track have been stored. The answer is simple - you dont have to know. X-CD-Roast keeps track of that. For each CD read, X-CD-Roast will create a .toc-file (Table-Of-Contents) which has stored which tracks belong to which CD and where exactly all fitting tracks are saved. So when you want to burn your CD you just have to pick the .toc-file and X-CD-Roast handles the details. When you delete the tracks after writing you simply can double-click on the .toc-file and all the tracks belonging to that CD will be automatically selected. Therefore its easy to keep track even when you stored lots of CDs in your image-directories. You have always only exactly one file to watch: The .toc-file. One more thing: You can double-click on any of the devices in the device-scan-screen in setup to get a detailed output of the device properties. (Gives for a MMC-writer a real informative output). New in alpha3 is that you can read selected tracks from your CDs and reorder them in any way you want before you burn them. Alpha4 does only contains several bugfixes, dynamic resize of the menues when a bigger font is used and a rework of the language handling to make translations easier. In the alpha5 I included the master option. You can now create your own data CDs. You can add as many directories to the image as you want. Use the "redirect" feature to place the directories on selected paths on the CD. See the mkisofs-manpage under "graft pointers". Its also now possible to create an image "on-the-fly", so you don't need any free space on your hard drive. Just be sure to have a fast enough computer to avoid buffer-underruns. All this is very experimental and hardly tested at all! Alpha6 was a maintainance release. No real new features, but tons of fixed details. Its a lot stabler than the alpha5. Alpha7 adds the non-root-mode. You are now able to start X-CD-Roast as every user, provided root installed it correctly and gave you permissions. Also some bug-fixes - should now really be quite robust. Alpha8 is a security update - alpha7 has some problems with the permissions. There are also a handful bugfixes and improvements. Alpha9 comes with a completely reworked non-root-mode and requires cdrecord-1.10 as cdwriting engine. There are tons of bugs fixed and some changes to the master menues. Alpha10 introduces multisession and writing of CD-Text along with a lot interface improvements. Alpha11 introduces building with autoconf/automake and translations with gettext. Updated to use features from the current cdrtools and a lot of user requests implemented. Alpha12 is a mainly a bugfix release with also some new experimental features. Most the ProDVD handling has improved and there is support for the Linux kernel 2.4.x ATA interface. (No scsi-emulation required) Alpha13 is a bugfix release. Alpha12 had introduced some serious problems with the multisession code. Alpha14 introduced a lot of new features and usage improvements. Better support for DVDs, more devices, startup optimizations, full drag&drop, remote-scsi and a lot more. Alpha15 fixes several serious bugs and introduces an experimental GTK2 port. Ok...this is all you need to know to copy or create your CDs. Please be sure to check the "README" and "FAQ"-file first before mailing me any questions. 27.10.2003 Thomas Niederreiter