

Gnometoaster User's Guide

Andreas Eckleder

Oct 21st 2000

\tableofcontents{}

1 Preparing the use of Gnometoaster

1.1 Software Requirements

Following the Unix concept, Gnometoaster heavily relies on already
available solutions to fulfill it's task rather than re-implementing
all the various functions required for CD recording. As a result of
that, however, you'll need to have a few additional programs and packages
installed on your system in order to successfully record a CD-R with
Gnometoaster.

* cdrecord, cdrdao or both of them to access your cd writer. gnometoaster
  is using cdrecord for track at once([footnote] cdrecord is being
called for every track that should be written on your disc. Between
two tracks,most CD writers insert a pregap of 2 seconds automatically
in this mode which makes CDDB lookups fail for 1:1 copies and doesn't
sound good for live recordings.)  while it is using cdrdao in disc at
once mode([footnote] the whole CD is written in a single step. Many
parameters of the future CD can be controllled manually,so indices
can be set in the middle of tracks,pregaps of any length can be inserted
etc. Most importantly,however, Gnometoaster can produce an exact copy
of a CD in DAO mode.) .

* the mpg123 software MPEG1-LayerIII([footnote] a highly efficient
audio compression scheme that allows for near-cd quality sound streams
at only 128kbit/sec. It was developed by the Fraunhofer institute
which is also holding a patent for the alghorithm used to encode/decode
these mp3 files.)  decoder is being used to allow recording of mp3 files
on cd as regular audiotracks without having to use any buffer space
on your harddrive.

* the famous sound processing utility sox is used to convert wav files
  into the raw audio data stream required by gnometoaster.

* To read out audio CDs you need cdda2wav

* A utility called mkisofs is used to create ISO9660 file systems

You can get all those packages by following the links on the Gnometoaster Homepage \protect\url{http://gnometoaster.rulez.org}.
If you have installed Gnometoaster as a distribution package, your
system should already meet the software requirements mentioned above.
Nevertheless I suggest to test the availability of the Software components
used by Gnometoaster as your package might not have the dependencies
([footnote] Most
program packages coming with a Linux Distribution are heavily relying
on other packages. For example, The Gimp, the well-known UNIX image
editing program, requires a library called Gtk which contains code
to visualize dialogs, buttons etc. In a Micosoft Windows(tm) environment
most software packages are providing all the libraries they need themselves.
Those libraries are usually copied into the windows system directory
by the installation routine,a process which not only requires the
user to reboot his machine once the installation procedure has finished
in most cases but also increases both the lack of stability of your
system and the size of the software package you want to install. Just
imagine two different programs using the same library in different
versions. as windows can't handle different versions of the same DLL
files effectively one program ends up overwriting the library of the
other with the consequence that one of the two will usually become
very unstable or will refuse to start at all. To overcome this problem
in a Linux(tm) environment, shared libraries are usually separated
from the programs using them and put into a different library. To
avoid a situation where a program is installed that needs a certain
library which isn't, the program's package will have a dependency
set to the library it needs somewhere in the package header. Thus,
the package manager program knows what it takes to make the program
run and can either refuse to install the program or try to install
the missing library as well. )  set correctly.

1.2 Kerneldrivers and other problems

Because of the history of CD Writers, all recorders on the market today
are using a SCSI command set to communicate with the operating system
and the recording software. This is how it came: CD Writers, because
of their nature as write-once devices, need a continuous data stream
when burning a CDR medium. If the transfer rate drops below a certain
level only once in a recoding session, the blank you've been recording
is usually lost. With initial medium prices at about $30, it made
no sense to even risk this to happen. The SCSI transport standard,
in contrast to IDE/ATAPI, has long been known to yield both high transfer
rates at low CPU time consumption and high reliability because SCSI
devices are independent to other SCSI devices on their bus. So SCSI
was chosen to be the bus system for the first CD Writers on the market.
However, when the first ATAPI cd recorders hit the low-cost market,
nobody wanted to change the way the drives were being accessed at
software level because this would have required manufacturers to design
a new drive chipset from scratch, let alone the effort to reimplement
all the driver infrastructure present already at the software side.
So they just designed an additional protocol layer wrapping the scsi
commands into ATAPI commands for the transfer over the IDE bus. So
all a recording software wanting to support ATAPI writers has to do
is wrapping the inital SCSI commands into the ATAPI protocol and sending
them to the cd writer over the IDE bus. This process is usually performed
by a special DLL coming the the recording Software in Windows(tm)
environments because there's no support by the operating system. Linux,
however, comes with a complete SCSI over ATAPI emulator kernel driver.
All you have to do to make your IDE recorder work with any linux cd
recording software out there is to configure your linux kernel to
make use of the idescsi device driver. How to do this is highly depending
on your system configuration and esp. the distribution you're using.
Linux Mandrake for example is configuring the idescsi driver automatically
if it detects a cd writer during installation. If you're using a self-compiled
kernel,however,you'll have to either compile idescsi support directly
into the kernel, in which case all your ATAPI cdrom drives will appear
to be SCSI drives from now on or compile idescsi as a module in which
case you'll have to tell the linux kernel with a parameter handed
down to the kernel by LILO at startup which drives you want to use
idescsi with. 

If you have a plain SCSI writer all you have to do is to load the hardware
driver necessary to access your scsi card. In either case you'll also
need the SCSI generic kernel module which makes it possible to send
SCSI commands to individual SCSI drives on the bus directly.

1.3 Hardware requirements

Recording CDRs puts a rather high load on your system's components.
Although most state of the art systems should easily be capable of
recording CDR media perfectly well the hardware requirements for cd
recording should not be underestimated as your cd recorder needs a
continuous stream of data with interruptions only as small as can
easily be handled by the onboard buffer provided by your recorder
which is usually about 512kb to 2048kb which, depending on the recording
speed, takes less than a second to exceed.

For the graphical user interface of Gnometoaster and cdrecord's internal
data buffer you'll need about 16MB of system RAM to record a CDR.
In fact, this amount of memory is not too generous as your X server
loves eating RAM as well.

Your CPU should at least be a Pentium class 90Mhz CPU, 200Mhz and more
are required to safely record .mp3 files on the fly([footnote] we
speak of on the fly recording if we don't store any temporary data
on your harddrive during the whole recording process. The data are
taken as and from wherever they come and written to cd directly after
having been converted into the needed format in realtime by a filter.) . 

If your CPU or the medium your data are coming from is not fast enough
to provide the content you want to store on a cd in realtime, Gnometoaster
can cache data on your harddrive. To make this possible, you need
at least 700MB of free harddrive space.

1.4 Obtaining and installing Gnometoaster

Gnometoaster is available in a number of different offerings from The Gnometoaster Homepage \protect\url{http://gnometoaster.rulez.org}:

* the sourcecode in a .tgz archive

* sourcecode packages for various distributions featuring the advantages
  of ``both worlds'', that is they're both highly configurable and
  easy to install/uninstall.

* binary packages for quite a few distributions including Debian Linux,
  Linux Mandrake, RedHat Linux and several system architectures including
  mk68000,intel x86,sparc,alpha. Debian Linux is probably the distribution
  with the most supported CPUs out there.

* CVS. This is for people who like to experiment. The CVS tree of Gnometoaster
  is being updated whenever there've been changes to the program code.
  Thus, it will probably contain untested or incomplete code 90% of
  the time. On the other hand, if you want to be the first to try
  out this cool new feature coming up in the next release...

1.4.1 Installing Gnometoaster from a source tgz archive

To install Gnometoaster from sourcecode,your computer needs to have
all the development tools necessary to create Gtk+/Gnome Applications
installed. Most importantly, this is the GNU C Compiler of a compatible
compiler capable of producing ELF executables. You need the kernel
header files as well as all header files of X,Gtk+ and glib. If your
system fulfills those requirements, you can now start the installation
procedure as follows:

* unpack the Gnometoaster archive with tar -xzf gtoaster.tgz

* change into the directory ``gtoaster`` created by this command and
  type ./configure. A special pre-compilation skript is now examining
  your system and adjusting the compilation procedure to your system's
  configuration. Especially the presence of GNOME([footnote] GNU Network
Object model environment, an effort to create both a uniform graphical
user interface similar to KDE and to provide a powerful application
framework including advanced IPC functions including OLE.)  is being
detected as well as the presence of the Enlightenment Sound Daemon
and other goodies. Please note that Gnometoaster will work perfectly
well without all those things, they are merely adding some spice to
using it.

* once the configuration procedure is done, type make to translate
  the sourcecode into an executable

* once all those steps are taken we're ready to actually install Gnometoaster
  on your system. To do so, simply type make install. This is the
  only step to be performed as root. The rest of the installation
  process can be performed as a normal user.

In case you should get fed up by Gnometoaster one day, the program
can easily be uninstalled by typing make uninstall in Gnometoaster's
sourcecode directory.

1.4.2 Installing a sourcecode distribution package

This depends on the distribution you're using. The easiest way to find
out how to build a gnometoaster source package on your system is to
look it up in your distribution's documentation.

1.4.3 Installing Gnometoaster as a binary package

This is the most simple way of installing Gnometoaster. You just have
to use your distribution's package manager to install the Gnometoaster
package. On a Debian box,you'd type dpkg -i gtoaster-xxxx.deb or apt-get
install gtoaster on a Debian potato system to install the most current
version of Gnometoaster directly over the internet. RedHat, Mandrake
and SuSE Users should type rpm -i gtoaster-xxxx.xxx.rpm. If Gnometoaster
came with your distribution as is the case with Linux Mandrake and
Debian, you can also use your distribution's package selection tool
to install Gnometoaster.

1.5 Configuring Gnometoaster

You should read the following instructions carefully to make sure that
the first cd you're recording doesn't become a coaster. Besides, you're
going to learn quite a few important things about the way Gnometoaster
works.

Start Gnometoaster from the account you're planning to run it in the
future by typing gtoaster on an X Terminal. In most cases this will
be the root account unless you set the cdrecord executable +suid root
(please be aware that this is opening a giant security hole on your
system as everyone can use cdrecord to create cds from any files on
your system. See FAQ section for a few ideas on how to make your cd
writer accessible to normal users).Now enter Gnometoaster's Preferences
window by choosing Edit/Preferences or clicking the toolbar icon.
We'll now step through all the panes of the preferences notebook and
change the things that need to be changed.

1.5.1 Common Options

The first thing we need to have a look at here is the ``Temporary Files''
entry. Please let this entry point to a directory with enough space
available to eventually hold about 700MB of data. Gnometoaster will
create it's temporary files there, especially any track images of
tracks that have been precached. Please make sure the directory is
writable.

The ``Precache datatracks'' option determines wether Gnometoaster should
create an image on your harddrive when copying a datatrack from one
cd to another. You should select this option if the CDROM you want
to copy contains scratches or your drive isn't fast enough to deliver
a continuous stream of data at your cd writer's recording speed. As
a rule of thumb the source your data is coming from should be at least
twice as fast as your recorder to make sure on-the-fly copying doesn't
produce coasters.

The fillstate display options finally are somthing for you to play
around with. They don't have any effect on Gnometoaster's functionality
whatsoever.

1.5.2 ISO9660 options

One important thing to change here is the ``CDfs Area'' entry,which
should point to an empty,writable directory that is used exclusively
by Gnometoaster. Do not make this the same directory you're using
in the ``Temporary Files'' entry!

You usually shouldn't need to configure any of the other options, with
the exception of the ``Mount ISO image with'' and ``Unmount ISO image
with'' entries. They should contain valid commands for mounting/unmounting
the datatrack of a CDROM in you cd writer. ``recorder'' in those lines
is a variable containing the device special file managing your cd
writer (e.g. /dev/scd0).

The ``Precache on harddrive'' option is pretty much resembling the
corresponding field in ``Common Option''. It determines wether an
image file of the datatrack you're mastering should be created on
your harddrive before writing the track to a CDR. You should only
select this if you're using a really slow system that can't create
an ISO track out of the files you decided to go into it as fast as
your recorder can write it.

If selected, the last option makes Gnometoaster delete any contents
of the directory pointed at by the ``CDfs Area'' entry. As Gnometoaster
is building up the filesystem of the CDR you're creating there, this
option presents you with a blank Filesystem editor the next time you're
running Gnometoaster. The only reason this Option is off by default
is that it might unintentedly delete any directory mistakenly entered
as ``CDfs Area''.

1.5.3 Audio Functions

For most users, the only option of interest in this section should
be wether or not to precache audio tracks. A great majority of all
CDROM drives are generally slower reading out audio cds than they
are reading data cds. So please make sure your drive can deliver audio
data fast enough to make on-the-fly writing possible. Also, audiotrack
error correction is generally more difficult so your throughput might
go down considerably for older/scratched cds.

1.5.4 File Types

This section is responsible for all file to track conversions done
by gnometoaster. If you want to record an mp3 or wav file to an audio
cd, this is where the necessary plugins are configured. Gnometoaster
is currently preconfigured for 3 different audio file types:

* mp3 MPEG1-Layer3 audio files

* wav files supported by sox, the linux audiofile conversion program

* raw files resembling a plain sound stream in 44kHz,16 Bit,Stereo,little
  Endian

All other files are generally treated as data tracks (MODE1,2048 Bytes
per sector). Note that there's now also a button 'Encoder' for each
filetype which can be used to open a dialog where you can specify
an encoder plugin along with all it's required settings that can consequently
be used by Gnometoaster to create the corresponding filetype from
any Gnometoaster tracks.

1.5.5 Drive setup

This is where you configure the CDROM drives and CD recorders installed
on your system. Generally, you should try clicking ``Scan Bus'' which
invokes some autodetect functionality built into Gnometoaster. In
about 90% of all cases you won't need to do anything else. Please
make sure, though, that Gnometoaster really did detect all your drives
correctly. At least one drive (the recorder), should have the recorder
flag set, which is indicated by a small symbol in the leftmost row
of the drive list. To keep Gnometoaster up to date about your system
configuration, you should perform the autodetect function whenever
you change your drive configuration (e.g. you move a cdrom drive from
one IDE channel to the other or change it from master to slave or
you change the LUN(s) of one or more of your scsi drives). You can
edit any entry of Gnometoaster's drive list by selecting it and clicking
``Edit''. You can manually add drives by clicking the ``Add'' button
as well as remove drives clicking ``Remove''. Note that all changes
to the drive list apply immediately, the undo function of the preferences
dialog won't work for the drive list.

1.5.6 Audio Properties

You can select from a list of available audio device drivers here.
The content of this list depends on what options were available at
compile-time. Currently, support for the Open Sound system as well
as the Enlightenment sound daemon is available. If you're using Gnome
as your desktop environment of choice, you should make sure to select
ESD support here as this will allow gnometoaster to share your soundcard
with other applications. 

1.5.7 Recorder Options

In most cases, you won't have to change anything here except the paths
to cdrecord and cdrdao. As both programs should be avaible in your
exec path anyway there's usually no need to do any changes to those
entries either. Just leave everything at it's default to be on the
safe side. For more informations about configuring the recorder options
see the chapter about advanced configuration in this manual. 

And that's already it! Now your Gnometoaster installation should be
prepared for a first recording test. Please proceed to reading the
user documentation now on how to test your Gnometoaster setup as well
as to learn how to use Gnometoaster to create CDRs.

2 Gnometoaster user documentation

2.1 Basic functionality and Interface concept

Now that you have setup Gnometoaster and the system it is running on,
you'll probably quite eagerly await the moment when you can record
your first CDR with Gnometoaster. But first we should do a first test
if everything is working. If you are using Gnometoaster with a CD/RW
recorder,insert a CD/RW blank and click the ``Clear Disc'' button
in the toolbar. If you don't have a toolbar (GNOME support disabled),press
the recorder icon in the lower left edge of the Gnometoaster window
and press the ``Clear Disc'' button in the ``notebook page'' showing
up. Gnometoaster should now show a dialog keeping you up-to-date about
the cleaning process which should disappear after a few minutes. Notice
the terminal labelled ``Client output'' to the right of the recorder
page. It shows the output of cdrecord while blanking your CD/RW. In
case you should see an error message there please check your configuration
and consult the troubleshooting section of this Documentation in case
you can't find anything unusual.

You should now spend a few minutes browsing through the notebook pages
in the lower section of Gnometoaster's main window. 

The first icon leads to a file manager displaying a virtualfilesystem.
Editing this filesystem (e.g. adding files, deleting files, creating
directories) will not affect any filesystem or directory of your computer
directly. What you're editing in Gnometoaster's Filesystem editor
is merely a prototype of hypothetical data track on the CDR you want
to create. 

The second icon is bringing up Gnometoaster's track editor. As with
the filesystem editor, this is just a virtual list of tracks. It will
become ``real'' as soon as you press Gnometoaster's record button.

With the last icon you can reach a page with various recorder settings.
You can use this page to adjust your recording settings to your needs,
e.g. you can set the recorder speed, the type of lead-out you want
to write, wether or not your cd should be bootable.

The upper half of the Gnometoaster window is showing a list of data
sources, notably an item called ``Unix tree'', one called ``CDROM
drives'' and one called ``Internal structures''. Clicking the ``Unix
tree'' item will make it expand into your directory structure starting
at your system's root directory. Simply click a directory to make
it's contents appear to the right of the tree. Expanding ``CDROM drives''
will show a list resembling the CDROM units installed on your system.
Clicking one of the drives will show a list of tracks of the medium
in that particular drive.Finally, ``Internal structures'' will show
just one item, the ``Gnometoaster filesystem''. 

Generally, you can drag any item showing up in the upper half of the
Gnometoaster window down into both the track editor and the filesystem
editor of the lower half. In fact that's how you will create your
CDRs. If you press your right mouse button instead of the left one
Gnometoaster will automatically create a copy of the data you added
on your harddrive. This can be usefuly when working with multiple
removable media. Additionally to the source section, files may also
be dragged into Gnometoaster from external sources like your favourite
filemanager.

Now finally notice Gnometoaster's fillstate display at the bottom of
the main window. It should display a percentage of space used up by
your tracks on the CDR you're about to create as well as the space
used in MB and audio playing time. MB sizes are displayed for the
audio track representation of all tracks([footnote] While audio tracks
have a sector size of 2354 bytes, data tracks have a lower 2048 bytes
per sector as data tracks are using a few bytes to store some extra
checksum improving error correction. So you can actually store less
data to a cd in data track format than you can in audio track format.
Gnometoaster generally displays tracksizes in audiotrack format. Due
to that, data track images will always result in tracks bigger than
their respective file sizes.) .

2.1.1 Making a CDR out of files stored on your computer's harddrive

This section describes how to record files (e.g. graphics files or
other documents) on a CDR. To write files to a CDR simply drag them
from the ``Unix tree'' section in the upper half of the Gnometoaster
window or from your favourite file manager into the filesystem editor
(use the first in the list of icons to the lower left of your Gnometoaster
window)([footnote] Please note that in Gnometoaster's current state
of development, it is impossible to record symbolic links to a cdr.
Gnometoaster dereferences all symbolic links to the files they are
pointing at. This can imply some problems if you're adding large and
complicated directory trees with references within sub directories
referencing others. Gnometoaster is dereferencing symbolic links in
a way that should prevent endless recursions. However, adding large
directory structures can still take a very long time. I'm working
hard on this problem and hope to be able to come up with a Gnometoaster
version that can handle symbolic links in a more sane way very soon.) .You
can delete files, create directories and rename files or directories
by selecting the affected files and clicking the right mouse button
to make a menu containing several options pop up. If you select the
root item of the filesystem editor's file tree and select rename,
you can set you data track's Volume ID. 

Finally, make sure your filesystem is part of Gnometoaster's destination
tracklist. The ``Gnometoaster Filesystem'' located in the ``Internal
structures'' folder in Gnometoaster's source area is the track-representation
of the virtual filesystem you just edited. It's getting added to the
tracklist automatically if it is empty when you start editing the
virtual filesystem. If you're done just hit the record button in Gnometoaster's
toolbar or, if you're using the plain Gtk version, change to the recording
options panel and press record there. Notice that the recording options
panel is also giving you some control about the recording process.
You can specify not to fixate a cd or to write a multisession TOC
([footnote] please
read this documentation's section about multisession CD recording
before you attempt to create a multisession CD.)  as well as you can
select the writing speed and wether or not to eject the CDR after
writing. 

2.1.2 Audio CD recording

If you're planning to record an audio cd, the first thing you'll be
bound to care about is where your audio data is going to come from.
Gnometoaster is providing two general methods to create an audio track:
building it from a file or taking and existent audio track from another
cd. 

In the first case, all you need to do is to select the audio file you
want to record from Gnometoaster's filesysten tree and drag it down
to the Track Editor (the pane connected to the second Icon in the
destination area). You'll see an entry being added to the tracklist
reading the filename of the audio file it was built from and the audio
track size in bytes to the right. Notice, that you can only use audio
files of a type Gnometoaster knows about. The default configuration
supports .mp3 and .wav files but it is pretty easy to add others (see
``advanced configuration'')([footnote] Due to some miscommunication
between mpg123 and Gnometoaster it is currently not possible to convert
single-channel mp3 files into audio tracks with Gnometoaster. mpg123
doesn't provide an option to force the creation of a raw stereo stream
and there's no way Gnometoaster can get the information that a stream
is either mono or stereo from mpg123. The filetype registry will support
one more field for determining the track format in future versions,
though. I apologize for this inconvience but I have to remind you
that Gnometoaster is work in progress and that those little problems
make about 80% of the work necessary to develop a program like Gnometoaster.) .

The second case is not really much different. Instead of selecting
a file from the filesystem tree you select a track from one of the
cdrom drives listed in the ``cdrom drives'' tree in gnometoaster's
source area. 

Finally, you can rearrange the tracks in Gnometoaster's tracklist to
make the playing order more interesting. To do so,just drag the tracks
around in the listl. Did you notice that tracks are always inserted
into the tracklist at where you released your mouse button ? All you
need to do now is adjusting your recorder settings the way you want
them and hit ``record''.

Audio CDs created with Gnometoaster are generally playable with any
audio cd player unless they are multisession discs (might work with
some players) or not ``fixated'' (the leadout hasn't been written).

Hint: In rare cases it could happen that Gnometoaster will not be able
to calculate the playing time of an mp3 or wav file correctly. This
is especially true for files containing small defects (e.g. an mp3
file transmitted over digital radio etc.). If you realize that the
calculated playing time of your mp3 as display in the tracklist differs
from it's real playing time, drag it into the tracklist with your
right mouse button pressed. This will make Gnometoaster precache your
mp3 file which will make Gnometoaster know the real size of the raw
audio stream as decoded by e.g. mpg123.

2.1.3 Creating a mixed mode CDR

The process of creating a mixed mode CDR with gnometoaster is a mere
combination of the steps described in 2.1.2 and 2.1.3. Remember, the
data track edited in Gnometoaster's filesystem editor can be found
in the ``internal structures'' section of the source area. Make sure
it always is the first track in your tracklist and you should be perfectly
fine. Just add whatever audio tracks you need behind the ``Gnometoaster
filesystem'' track in the tracklist.

2.2 Advanced functions

2.2.1 Creating a CDR with multiple data tracks

Gnometoaster supports creating more than one data tracks on a CDR.
This is as simple as just dragging the desired tracks to the tracklist
in the order you want them,the only restriction is that two instances
of the ``Gnometoaster filesystem'' will always contain the same filesystem
structure. This might change in future releases. Also note that tracks
other than the first one can't be read by most operating systems.
The only OS fully supporting more than one data tracks on a single
cd I know of is BeOS(tm).

2.2.2 Making a copy of an existing CDROM

In some situations it can be important to make a backup copy of a cdrom.
This can be easily accomplished with Gnometoaster by selecting the
cdrom drive the cd you want to copy resides in. Select all the tracks
and drag them to Gnometoaster's track editor. Check your recorder
options and hit record.

2.2.3 Managing multisession discs

If configured properly, Gnometoaster lets you create Multisession discs
just the way your favourite Windows(tm) application does. This is
how it works:

When the first CDROMs hit the market, there were no cd recorders and
there was no way to alter the contents of a written CD in any way.
When the first recorders came out soon voices could be heard asking
why they couldn't just append files to their backups done with the
cd recorder, after all the free space on a CDR is visible even with
your bare eyes if there simply wasn't enough data to fill a whole
CD. With CDs traditionally being a write-once medium, there was no
easy way to just append data to it. The result was that a slightly
modified type of TOC([footnote] Table of Contents: That's what your
common audio cd player/CDROM drive is reading when you insert a CD.
The TOC of a disc is storing informations about the tracks on it.) 
was created, containing an additional field with a pointer beyond
the currently written area of the CD so's CD recorders would know
where to continue writing. 

So what does all this have to do with Gnometoaster ? Well, to create
a multisession disc, that is a disc you can append data to later on,
you have to select the ``Multisession'' Option in Gnometoaster's recording
panel. This will make Gnometoaster write the special kind of TOC necessary
to make the disc appendable. 

To append tracks to your multisession disc, simply drag them to trackedit
and hit record. If you're sure you don't want to add any more tracks
to a particular disc you can unselect the ``Multisession'' option
when writing the last session([footnote] every write cycle of a multisession
disc is called a session. With special programs, sessions can be ``mounted''
independently from each other.) . 

Now how do you append files to an existing ISO track stored on a multisession
disc ? To accomplish this, a concept called session-linking was introduced.
With it, you can tell any multisession capable cdrom drive to link
two tracks of different sessions together. However, doing so requires
some informations about the last session when creating the track containing
the files you want to append to the disc. So before you can start
adding files using Gnometoaster's filesystem editor you have to click
the ``Import'' icon or select ``Import session'' in Gnometoaster's
Edit menu while making sure that the disc you want to append your
session to is residing in your cd writer. Your writer will now show
some reading activities over a few seconds and once it's done you'll
notice that all files already stored on your multisession disc will
appear in Gnometoaster's Filesystem Editor in blue color to make clear
that they belong to the last session. You can now edit your Filesystem
as usual (e.g. add files,create directories etc.) with the only exception
that you can't delete any files or directories of the last session
yet. This functionality will, however, be added in a later version
of Gnometoaster. Once you're done, hit record and enjoy. If you plan
on adding any further sessions, make sure you select the ``Multisession''
option in Gnometoaster's recording panel.

2.2.4 Creating bootable CDs

Gnometoaster currently supports the most common type of a bootable
CDROM: floppy disk emulation. In this mode, your PCs BIOS is providing
some basic CROM access functions that can read out an image file of
a bootable floppy disc stored on your CDROM. Using this image, your
BIOS will transparently emulate a normal floppy disc in this mode
of operation, e.g. when making your CDR bootable using an image of
a DOS boot disk, you'll have this image visible to your system as
drive A: once booting is done. Note that floppy emulation as well
as any other emulations do only work as long as the BIOS is being
used to access your disk drive. This deserves specific notion as Linux
is using it's own floppy drivers as soon as the kernel has been loaded.

With this concept in mind it should be pretty easy to create a bootable
CDR with Gnometoaster. Just drag the bootable floppy image you want
to use into Gnometoaster's Filesystem Editor. Now select it and press
the right mouse button. Choos ``Make Bootimage'' in the popup menu
and you're done. Now add whatever you want to your CD and hit record.

If you take a look at the recording panel you'll find a section called
``El Torito'' there. El Torito is the name of the standard defining
bootable CDs. So consequently you'll find configuration options regarding
bootable CDs there. There's not much you'll ever need to do in this
section of the recording panel. It's there merely to show the current
state of your CDR regarding booting capabilities. In case you should
suddenly decide not to make your CD bootable after all you can unselect
the ``Make bootable'' option there. The other way would be to just
delete the boot image from Gnometoaster's Filesystem Editor. If the
selected bootimage doesn't point to an existing file, the ``Make bootable''
option will be grayed out.

2.2.5 Working with CD/RW media

CD/RW media are a fine thing for backups and to share your files and
music with friends. You can work with CD/RW media just the way you
do with normal CDRs within Gnometoaster. There's really just one thing
you'll need additionally to the normal functions if you're using CD/RWs:
disc blanking. 

To blank a CD/RW disc with Gnometoaster you just have to click the
``Blank Disc'' icon in your toolbar or press the ``Blank Disc'' button
of Gnometoaster's recording panel. Note that Gnometoaster supports
two ways of blanking discs: a full blank and TOC only.

Performing a full blank your cd recorder is burning it's way through
the whole CD/RW medium and erasing any data on it. Depending on your
cd writer's speed this can take as long as your disc's maximum playing
time so you will usually want to clear the TOC only, which will fool
the cd record into seeing a blank medium while really just the first
few sectors are blank. Clearing a disc this way is taking less than
two minutes at double-speed([footnote] 300kb/sec. The minimum throughput
you can currently buy cd writers with.) .

2.2.6 Disc at once recording and what it is good for

Disc-at-once recording has been a buzz-word among audiophiles for quite
some time now. One of the major problems early cd recorders had was
the fact that they could only write one track at once. Between tracks,
those devices had to reposition and recalibrate their lasers, leaving
2 seconds between tracks unusable for recording. Indeed, those 2 seconds
are filled with rubbish and explicitly silenced by your audio cd player.
If your audio player is somewhat old, you might actually end up hearing
that rubbish. Anyways, a 2 seconds gap between tracks is a live cd
killer and that's why there's been an enormous interest in getting
rid of this gap. Most modern cd writers hence support a mode of operation
where the whole cd is being written at once. Of course, this also
sets certain requirements on the recording software used. 

There are a few things you should know about Gnometoaster's disc-at-once
capabilities: While Joerg Schilling's cdrecord is perfectly capable
of writing cds in dao mode, it can't do the trick ``on-the-fly'',
essentially requiring the user to store all audio data to be written
on cd to his harddrive in either .wav or .raw format. As this doesn't
fit Gnometoaster's conception very well, I chose to use cdrdao, yet
another cd recording backend, for dao recording. So in order to record
cds in dao mode, you'll have to have cdrdao installed on your system
([footnote] Note
that cdrdao only supports a subset of the drives supported by cdrecord.
It is thus not guaranteed that your drive will be supported by Gnometoaster
in disc-at-once mode. The first thing you should make sure is that
your cd writer is actually capable of writing in disc-at-once mode.
If your cd writer is (scsi/atapi)-mmc3 compatible it should generally
work with cdrdao. For all other writers, please consult the list of
drives supported by cdrdao (follow the link to the cdrdao homepage).) .
You don't have to perform any special configuration steps within Gnometoaster
to make dao recording work. 

To record a CDR in dao mode, simply check the ``Disc-at-once'' option
in the recording panel and hit record.

2.3 The concept of Precaching or what can I do if my computer's not fast
  enough ?

Less and less people will find themselves in the situation where they
can't record an mp3 file to a cdr because their computer simply can't
manage to decode the mp3 stream as fast as their writer needs it's
raw audio stream. Or just imagine you want to make a copy of this
very old compact disc which has been used as a flying saucer by your
son several times as well as by your wife to make your dining table
stand more stable etc. No CDROM built upon earth technology will be
able to read those CDs accurately within a time that would satisfy
your recorder.

In Gnometoaster, there's a way around this. You can either enable precaching
for a particular track type in Gnometoaster's preferences which will
then apply to any track of that type or, alternatively, you can hold
down your right mouse button when dragging your files/tracks to the
Track Editor. This concept even works for the Filesystem Editor. Just
imagine you want to create a backup of that old word processor's installation
discs cause 1.44'' Discs have always had a slight tendency to forget
about their contents after a few years. Precaching the whole ISO9660
filesystem won't do in this case cause you need to change discs quite
a few times while creating the filesystem. Again, the solution is
to just hold down your right mouse key while adding the files on your
discs, which will make Gnometoaster precache those individual files.

2.4 Track to file conversion or: Let's do it the other way round

While functionality to convert tracks to files is provided by most
cd recording programs, few let you decide as accurately as Gnometoaster
does what to make of those tracks. Imagine you want to store your
favourite audio CD's contents on your harddisk as mp3 files. There's
plenty of other software available for this, I've been using one called
grip for quite some time now. However, if we have to provide a proper
interface for creating .wav files anyway, why not support the whole
bunch of extensions and file types that are supported by Gnometoaster
the other way round ?

So the deal is this: You can drag any track down to the Filesystem
Editor and it will be converted into it's default filetype automatically.
Dragging it with the right mouse button pressed will prompt you with
a popup menu asking for a specific filetype to be created.

If you don't want to add your track to the Filesystem Editor but want
to store it into some directory on your harddrive, you can select
all the tracks you want and press the right mouse button. Simply select
``Save Track as ...'' in the popup menu. You'll be prompted for a
destination directory and the filetype you want to convert to. Note
that with properly configured encoder settings mp3 files will automatically
get their mp3 tags set appropriately if your computer is connected
to a cddb server.

Hint: You can also use Gnometoaster's file conversion scheme to convert
existing files of a certain type on your harddrive. Just drag the
files you want to convert down to the Track Editor. This will convert
them into tracks. Dragging them back up to Gnometoaster's builtin
file manager or using their context menu you can now save them as
whatever type of file you want.

3 Frequently asked Questions

Some things just can't be covered in the normal documentation. And
apart from that, the documentation is unfortunately the last place
your average user would look for a solution to his/her problems. That's
why FAQs have a very long tradition I don't want to break with Gnometoaster.
So here it is: the Gnometoaster FAQ, assembled using bits from emails
and postings to the mailing list and some of my genuine fantasy.

3.1 Files added to the cd's filesystem don't show up in the filesystem
  editor, I'm getting something on the lines of ``Can't create symlink:
  xxxx'' on the console instead

You have to configure the ``Cdfs Area'' in Gnometoaster's preferences
setup to point to a valid, writeable directory used exclusively by
Gnometoaster. Please follow the installation and setup instructions
of the manual to get Gnometoaster running.

3.2 Can I drag and drop multiple files or tracks at once with Gnometoaster ?

Some users seem to have a problem using Gtk's multiselect scheme. To
drag multiple items you can either choose each individual item or
simply drag a bunch of items in a row. The difference is that you
use the CTRL key for the former while you use the SHIFT key for the
latter. The rest is just the same. Click the first item you want to
drag. Either click the last item of a row or the next item you want
to drag while holding down your SHIFT or CTRL key respectively. When
selecting the last one of the items you want to drag, don't release
the mouse button but start dragging your mouse to the desired destination
for your items. That's it.

3.3 DAE (Digital Audio extraction) doesn't work with Gnometoaster or
  if I drag an audio track from a drive's track overview down to the
  preview player it doesn't change from ``Play''to ``Stop Playing''\label{dae probs}

There may be many reasons for this. First of all, check that your cdrom
drives are setup properly. If they are, please make sure the corresponding
device special files have the appropriate permissions. If you're using
the scsi generic interface to read out audio tracks, make sure cdda2wav
has the correct permissions to access the sg interface. For some types
of cds (notably cd-plus cds) you need a recent version of cdda2wav
in order to be able to digitally extract audio tracks. As of this
time, Gnometoaster is being developed based on version 1.9 of Jrg
Schilling's cd recording tools.

3.4 Audio CDs created with Gnometoaster are playing fine on my computer
  but aren't recognized by my stereo

First of all, make sure you selected the ``fixate'' switch and deselected
the ``Multisession'' switch in Gnometoaster's recording panel while
creating your CD. Also scan Gnometoaster's recording terminal for
eventual error messages produced by cdrecord while fixating your disc
(all errors are marked red in the recording terminal). If none of
the above applies, you're probably using a very old cd player that
can't handle CDR discs. Sorry, you're out of luck there unless you
upgrade your cd player. I also noticed recently that some DVD players
aren't capable of handling CDR and CDRW media while they're playing
plain audio CDs just fine. This is just one of the many things you
should take care of when buying a DVD player. Finally, some very cheap
blanks can't be read by some audio cd players. This is because the
organic layer used for recording you music is very thin on those CDRs
and your cd player's laser might be looking straight through it. Using
a lower recording speed might sometimes solve this issue.

3.5 When writing mp3 or wav files, I get a lot of silence at the end
  of the track or I get tracks that consist of nothing but silence

This generally means that either you don't have mpg123 or sox respectively
installed on your system (future versions of Gnometoaster will have
to check for this and issue a warning) or (which is more probable)
the mp3 file you tried to record was corrupt in some way. Although
mpg123 tries hard to play defective mp3s, sometimes it will get out
of sync and stop playing entirely. 

3.6 When copying audio tracks from other cds, I get nothing but silence
  or the tracks seem to be incomplete

see section \ref{dae probs} about possible reasons for this behavior.

3.7 I can't write multisession discs

Please follow the instructions of the Gnometoaster manual.

3.8 When trying to import the last session of a multisession disc, no
  files are being displayed in Gnometoaster's Filesystem editor

Please check the mountpoint of your cd writer as entered in Gnometoaster's
drive setup. Also make sure that a corresponding entry in /etc/fstab
is present and, if you're running Gnometoaster as a non-root user,
the writer is user-mountable (the ``user'' option is present in the
corresponding line of /etc/fstab).

3.9 Multisession discs written by Gnometoaster can't be read by drives
  other than my cd writer

Make sure you check the ``fixate'' switch in Gnometoaster's recording
panel. When writing multisession discs, this switch should be checked
permanently.

3.10 Gnometoaster exits a few seconds after startup, stating something
  like ``aborted.'' on the commandline

This has been a known bug for quite some time which has been fixed
in recent releases of Gnometoaster. If you're still experiencing this
bug, please upgrade to a more recent version of Gnometoaster. If you
don't want to upgrade, one possible way to get rid of this problem
is to recompile gnometoaster with multithreading disabled: just pass
--without-pthreads to the ./configure script and recompile gnometoaster.

3.11 Gnometoaster exits right after startup

This has also been a known bug for quite some time which has been fixed
in recent releases. If you don't want to upgrade, you can get rid
of it by simply deleting the ~/.gtoaster.dircache file in your home
directory.

3.12 How do I uninstall Gnometoaster

This is a question very specific to the way you installed Gnometoaster.
If you've installed Gnometoaster from a ready-made package, use your
distribution's package manager to uninstall Gnometoaster. If you installed
Gnometoaster from sourcecode, please reextract the source archive,
change into it and type ``./configure'' and then ``make uninstall''
as root.

3.13 Compiling Gnometoaster gives me a whole lot of error messages

You probably don't have one or more of the required support libraries
installed on your system. Note that the source distribution of Gnometoaster
not only needs all the libraries like libgtk or libgnomeui32 etc.
but also their header files.In most distributions those can be found
in packages with the usual name and ``-dev'' or ``-devel'' appended.
Older versions of Gnometoaster didn't compile on Linux 2.0.x systems.
Please upgrade to a more recent version of Gnometoaster. The way to
make your older version of Gnometoaster compile on those systems would
be to replace all occurrences of #include <linux/cdrom.h> by #include
<linux/ucdrom.h> in the source code. As mentioned, recent versions
of Gnometoaster are taking care of this automatically. 

3.14 Gnometoaster's idea of the filesystem size of my data cd is wrong

Please remove the -a option from the mkisofs call in Gnometoaster's
preferences setup. Recent mkisofs versions don't support this option
any more, issuing a warning instead which voids Gnometoaster's tracksize
calculation. Recent versions of Gnometoaster have their default configuration
changed to address this problem. Upgrading from an older version will
give you the opportunity to automatically fix this issue. Just answer
the upgrade questions occurring when first running the new version
of Gnometoaster with yes. There is also a slight possibility that
you have a very old version of mkisofs installed on your system which
doesn't yet support the -print-size option. In this case there is
no other way than updating mkisofs.

Please ensure mkisofs is actually installed on your system. Although
mentioned almost everywhere in the Docs and on the Homepage there
are still people simply forgetting to make sure Gnometoaster's dependencies
are met. Future versions will perform a system sanity check at startup
but until then you'll have to take care of those matters yourself.

3.15 Gnometoaster is recording/playing some mp3 files at a very high pitch

This has been a problem with older versions of Gnometoaster and the
way they invoked mpg123. Please add both the --stereo and the -r 44100
option to the mpg123 call in Gnometoaster's filetype registry or upgrade
to a more recent version of Gnometoaster.

3.16 When I add large directories/my home directory to Gnometoaster's
  CD-Filesystem my Computer seems to work endlessly with vast harddrive
  activity

Gnometoaster in it's current state of development is unapt to make
large harddrive backups. The problem you're facing is caused by symbolic
links. Gnometoaster is using symbolic links internally to build up
the filesystem tree of your cd. Because of that, no ``real'' symbolic
links can be recorded on cd. So Gnometoaster has to get rid of them
by resolving them into normal directories and files. While this is
not a problem for files (they simply get written twice), it definitely
can be for directories. Take, for example, a typical gnome user's
home directory. it contains a directory .gnome-desktop with links
to the home directory itself, all cdrom and disk drives of the system
and maybe even a link back to the root directory. As Gnometoaster
has to resolve all those links into normal directories, each containing
all data referenced by the link, it should be easy to imagine how
long this can take on a large system. I'm working on this problem
and the next release of Gnometoaster should finally get rid of this
issue but until then, please don't use Gnometoaster for harddisk backups.

3.17 I can't hear anything when dragging an audio file or a track to the
  preview player but recording works perfectly well

There's most probably some problem with your system's or Gnometoaster's
audio configuration. Please enter Gnometoaster's preferences setup
and change the audio output driver from ``Enlightenment sound daemon''
to ``Open Sound System''. ESD mode only works if the enlightenment
sound daemon is running in the background but it is a very nice way
of accessing your sound card as it allows for sharing it with other
applications.

in case you still can't hear anything, please check your system's sound
setup (e.g. if the kernel sound module is being loaded correctly)
and make sure that no other applications are blocking your sound hardware.

With older versions of Gnometoaster selecting a track/file and pressing
the ''Play'' button won't work. You have to either drag your desired
item to the ``Play'' button or double-click the item. This is not
a bug but a conceptual thing which will be fixed in future versions
of Gnometoaster, I just thought you should know it cause this apparently
driving some people crazy. 

3.18 Gnometoaster keeps recording a 2 seconds pregap between tracks which
  is inappropriate for the type of content I'm recording

Please check the ``Disc-at-once'' option in Gnometoaster's recording
panel and make sure you have cdrdao installed and setup properly.
Future versions of Gnometoaster will allow you to adjust the size
of the pregap, you will even be able to place sound within the pregap.

3.19 I can record CDRs in disc-at-once mode but I can't in track-at-once
  mode or vice versa

DAO and TAO writing are performed using different backends. While cdrecord
is being used for TAO recording, cdrdao is being used in DAO mode.
Both programs have different hardware requirements so please make
sure your system meets the requirements of the backend you're trying
to use and especially that the backend is installed and setup correctly
on your system (e.g. with access to the scsi generic interface).

3.20 I'm new to Linux and this whole cd recording stuff. I can't get Gnometoaster
  to do anything

Please read the documentation from the very beginning. I've tried very
hard to explain all the implications of cd writing with linux/other
unix systems but this won't help you unless you read it. 

3.21 DAE is very slow within Gnometoaster but I can read out audio cds
  much more quickly using other applications

There are two modes of addressing a cdrom drive on unix/linux systems:
using the scsi interface and using cooked ioctl() calls to the cdrom's
device special file. Gnometoaster is using the latter by default cause
this is increasing the probability that DAE will work on a system
at all. However, some cdrom drives are much faster reading out audio
data using the scsi generic interface. To make Gnometoaster use the
SCSI generic interface for DAE, just select the ``use scsi generic
for DAE'' flag on the properties page of the desired drive. You can
get access to the drive properties from Gnometoaster's drive setup.
Just select the desired drive and click ``Edit''.

3.22 Although files are showing up in the filesystem editor, the fillstate
  display is still showing 0 MB and when I try to record a cd Gnometoaster
  states that there are no tracks to be recorded

To understand this behavior you have to know that the data track part
of your cd is represented by a data track within Gnometoaster's tracklist.
This track is called ``Gnometoaster Internal Filesystem'' and if it
doesn't exist in the tracklist, your data track will not be taken
into account when writing the cd. To add you filesystem to the tracklist,
drag it from ``Internal structures'' down into the tracklist. You'll
find your fillstate display the tracksize of your Filesystem immediately.
Note that the Gnometoaster internal filesystem is being added to the
tracklist automatically when the Filesystem is being edited and there
are no other tracks in the tracklist yet. In all other cases, you
have to add the Filesystem track manually.

3.23 Why do I have to scan through the whole internet to meet all the
  requirements of Gnometoaster ?

The answer is as simple as sad. All backend applications Gnometoaster
is using are under continuous development. Putting them all together
on an ftp server or something would require someone maintaining this
server on a full-time basis. This is beyond the possibilities of a
voluntary project like Gnometoaster. However, with more and more Linux
distributions prepackaging Gnometoaster, those problems should go
away in the future as long as you keep using the tested and mostly
stable Gnometoaster packages coming with your distribution. Those
packages have dependency informations built-in and won't install unless
all the dependencies are met. Together with a package manager capable
of automatically resolving dependency issues it should be easy to
install Gnometoaster. Linux distributions coming with Gnometoaster
include Debian Linux, Linux Mandrake, Turbo Linux. If you're maintaining
a Linux distribution coming with Gnometoaster, please write me so's
I can include your distribution in this list.

3.24 I want to install Gnometoaster on distribution xxx. Which of the
  packages on your Homepage should I get ?

This does indeed depend on your distribution. First of all, check if
there's a package explicitly made for your distribution. If there
isn't, check if your distribution is RedHat compatible or does at
least use RedHat's package manager. In this case it should be secure
to just download and install a redhat package from Gnometoaster's
homepage (Distributions that should work with RedHat packages include
RedHat itself, Linux Mandrake, SuSE Linux). If you are using Debian
or a Debian-based distribution (which includes Corel Linux and Stormix)
please use the Debian package instead. 

Of course, there's always the option of compiling Gnometoaster yourself
from the source package. This will ensure that you're using the most
recent version of Gnometoaster as well as that there isn't some sort
of binary incompatibility to the libraries installed on your system.
Please follow the instructions in this manual on how to install the
source distribution of Gnometoaster.

3.25 When clicking the ``Record'' button, Gnometoaster is pausing for
  a few seconds to give the user a chance to abort the recording process.
  How can I stop the recording process in case I actually need to ?

Just press the ``Stop'' button of the recording dialog. Note that this
may not have an immediate effect as Gnometoaster is giving the recording
backend a chance to exit gracefully. In case the recording backend
doesn't exit, you can send it a SIGTERM signal using the commandline
by typing ``killall cdrecord'' or ``killall cdrdao'' depending on
wether you're recording in TAO or DAO mode. Gnometoaster will then
return to it's normal mode of operation and you can start a second
attempt of recording your CDR by just pressing the ``record'' button
again.

3.26 Why does Gnometoaster display 746MB of recording space on my CDR
  while the medium I'm using can hold only 650MB of data ?

Gnometoaster is calculating the sizes of all tracks as if they were
audio tracks. There are various modes in which a track can be recorded
to a CDR. The most important ones are audio mode and MODE1 data mode.
The latter reserves extra space per sector to store additional checksums
which is necessary to maintain the high level of data security needed
when storing binary data. As a result, less data can be stored to
a CDR in data mode than in audio mode. This makes for the difference
between 746MB and 650MB. 

3.27 How can I write to 80 Min. blanks with Gnometoaster. The application
  doesn't seem to recognize those blanks

No Problem! Although Gnometoaster doesn't currently adapt it's fillstate
display to to increased storage size of 80 min. blanks Gnometoaster
is still perfectly capable of using all space available on such blanks.
You can even record more than the usual 650MB of data to a normal
blank using Gnometoaster. How much more depends on the type of blank
you're using.

3.28 Drag and drop doesn't work from any KDE application (like kfm, konqueror,
  ...)

This is a known issue. Unfortunately, drag and drop is handled differently
by KDE applications than it is by Gtk/Gnome and most other applications
like StarOffice, Netscape, ... Efforts are underway to support the
XDnd protocol used by Gnometoaster within KDE so this issue should
go away in the future. First tests with the upcoming KDE2.0 however
show that KDE is still lacking Gtk/Gnome compatible Drag and Drop
support. 

3.29 I tried to record a file or a filesystem but I only see some sort
  of warning in the recording terminal and the recording process doesn't
  even start

Please read this warning carefully. Note that by definition, compact
discs cannot hold any tracks smaller than ~ 4secs. of playing time.
cdrdao will refuse to record such tracks while cdrecord will pad them
to a bigger size. Future versions of Gnometoaster will address this
problem in a more sane way so this is something for the ``known bugs''
chapter.

3.30 Gnometoaster doesn't update it's progress dialogs when writing a
  cd or precaching a file/track

This is a known problem. It has been fixed for writing cds in the threaded
version of Gnometoaster. However, if you have, for some reason, pthreads
support disabled on your system, there's hardly a chance to make those
progress boxes update correctly for you. You should upgrade to a newer
kernel/libc combination that supports multithreading.

3.31 I tried to copy a CD-Plus CD today but Gnometoaster seemed to be
  unable to read it's data track

Gnometoaster doesn't support reading the data track of a CD-Plus CD
as of now. This functionality will be implemented in one of the next
versions.

3.32 Gnometoaster seems to be notoriously trying to open a network connection
  to some server. Does it have some sort of built-in Trojan transmitting
  my data to some remote database ?

Don't worry, it's just the CDDB routine trying to identify the cds
in your cdrom drives. 

3.33 How can I turn off CDDB lookups ?

The current version of Gnometoaster doesn't provide a switch to disable
cddb lookups. Instead, I'd suggest to set your localhost as the cddb
server Gnometoaster should attempt to use. Doing so will make Gnometoaster
try to establish a connection to your localhost's cddb port every
20 seconds which will of course fail but this won't do you any harm.

3.34 I tried to burn a CD(R/RW) with a few files on it.Once I had hit
  record, Gnometoaster went through all the files and recorded them
  onto the disc. However, I cannot mount the result. What went wrong ?

You probably added your files to the Track Editor rather than the File
Editor with the result that Gnometoaster created a CD containing several
data tracks each being a copy of one of the files you added (just
as if those files had been track images). Add your files to the Filesystem
Editor and your CDs will work just fine.

3.35 Gnometoaster is just running fine on my root account but it only
  causes a bunch of error messages if run from my normal user account
  or it doesn't display any tracks for my cdrom drives. Aren't Linux
  users supposed to do their daily work as a normal user ?

True. However, cdrecord and cdda2wav require their controlling user
to have access privileges to the scsi bus which are not granted to
normal users by default within any sane setup. However, you can give
your users explicit access to your cd writer(s) and your cdrom drives
by setting the access privileges of the /dev/sgx (where x depends
on the bus nmbr. and target id of your writer) and the devices controlling
your cdrom. Probably the best way to do this is to create a new group
``cdwriter'' using the addgroup command, add all users that should
be allowed to burn cds to that group by editing the /etc/groups file
and then typing chown :cdwriter /dev/sgx and chmod g+rw /dev/sgx.
Make sure to also give access to the cdrom device file associated
with your writer and any cdrom drive you want to use. On most systems
you just have to add your desired users to the existing cdrom group
in /etc/groups.

Of course, if security is a non-issue on your system, you could also
just grant access to those devices to anybody by typing chmod a+rw
/dev/whatever or set cdrecord and cdda2wav +suid root by typing chmod
a+s /usr/bin/cdrecord and chmod a+s /usr/bin/cdda2wav. Again, don't
forget to grant access to your cdrom device special files. Otherwise,
Gnometoaster won't be able to read out the TOC of your discs and just
display nothing in your drive's tracklist.

Setting the Gnometoaster binary +suid root is explicitly deprecated
!!! This will enable any user on your system to read out *any* files
not only by using some obscure commandline program but by using a
comfortable filemanager! On most setups this is definitely not what
you would want!.

Unfortunately, some versions of cdrecord seem to depend on the ability
to disable swapping for certain memory regions. Instead of just trying
to record your stuff anyway, those versions will exit immediately
if they couldn't disable swapping for their buffer memory. This, of
course, is a privileged operation only allowed to the superuser. So
all you can do in this case is to set cdrecord +Suid root. I haven't
investigated into this any further but I think it is evident that
on most modern systems buffer space in the amounts needed by cdrecord
won't be swapped out anyway during the recording phase as it is too
frequently used. 

3.36 Why does Gnometoaster need cdrdao for Disc-at-once recording and
  doesn't use cdrecord's dao functionality instead ?

I'd love to support disc-at-once writing with cdrecord cause this would
simplify the procedure of setting up a system for Gnometoaster immensely
and cdrecord has a much larger base of supported recorders but cdrecord
can't write any tracks or files on-the-fly when in DAO mode. This
doesn't fit at all into Gnometoaster's conception where everything
can be done on-the-fly if your hardware is fast enough. Some day there
may be support for writing on-the-fly in disc-at-once mode with cdrecord.
Once this sort of functionality is there, I'll support it.

3.37 Analysing Gnometoaster's way of creating cds I encountered those
  odd TOC files it is generating for cdrdao. Why is there just a ``-``
  instead of filenames all around the place ?

This is how Gnometoaster is doing things. Instead of telling cdrdao
to take whatever it takes to create a cd out of files on your harddrives
it is actively delivering all content necessary for this to cdrdao
using it's stdin pipe. This way, Gnometoaster can control what's being
written on cd in realtime, which is absolutely essential if you want
to burn stuff on-the-fly. For cdrdao it doesn't matter if a certain
audiotrack has it's origin in another cd, a wav file or an mp3 file.
Audiotracks look all the same for cdrdao, it's Gnometoaster making
the difference in preparing the data for it.

3.38 I tried to grant access to all device files necessary for cd recording
  in order to enable cdrecord to run from a non-root user account.
  However, cdrecord quits right after startup complaining that it
  couldn't lock shared memory. What's this about ?

Unless I get confirmation about this, I assume that there are different
versions of cdrecord around, ones that can work in non-privileged
mode and ones that can't because they're trying to prevent the linux
kernel from swapping out their memory buffers (which won't happen
anyway unless you have a system with a very small amount of ram, say
about 4MB or something :-)). Try to get a new/different version of
cdrecord and you might be lucky to implement your security concept
after all, otherwise you'll just have to set cdrecord +suid root.

3.39 When I click record, nothing happens

Maybe you didn't setup your cd writer in the preferences. One of the
drives listed in Gnometoaster's drivelist has to be the cd recorder.
Select the ``This drive can write CDs'' switch in the drive setup
to tell Gnometoaster that a specific drive is a recorder.

3.40 On what platforms does Gnometoaster run ? Are there any plans of
  porting Gnometoaster to Windows9x/2K/M/NT/CE ?

Gnometoaster's primary development target is currently x86 Linux. Gnometoaster
should compile on any platform Linux is running on like Alpha,Sparc
etc. However, there may be problems with Endianness, especially with
new features as I don't have a BigEndian based system available for
testing. You should be on the safe side if you're using a prepackaged
version of Gnometoaster like that coming with Debian/Alpha etc. If
you found an Endian bug or something like that, don't keep it to yourself,
share it with the rest of us.

As of a windows version: This sort of thing is not even in the planning
phase. For various reasons such a port will probaby never be done
by myself. However, if you feel that Gnometoaster is absolutely the
thing the windows world needs and you want to make a port of it, you're
of course welcome. Maybe we can even work out something to accomplish
this within the same sourcetree. Note that cdrecord's already there
and that there's even a port of the Gtk Toolkit available so the job
shouldn't be too hard after all.

3.41 I've got this very bad problem and I simply can't work with Gnometoaster
  cause it's completely unusable

This sort of bug probably won't have a chance to last long. Just take
a look at the Gnometoaster Homepage and check for a new version or
a bugfix/patch. Sometimes it may not be visible clearly enough which
is the most current version, esp. if you're downloading a prepackaged
version of Gnometoaster so please make absolutely sure that you're
using the most current version available.

4 References

If you still have problems using Gnometoaster, feel free to write to
A.Eckleder@bigfoot.com or share your problems with the members of
the Gnometoaster mailing list (gnometoaster@lists.kando.hu). 

For other references see http://gnometoaster.rulez.org
