Burn, Baby, Burn

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

My latest obsession is Links Extreme (Access Software; $25 street price), a CD-ROM game that combines two of my favorite things: playing golf and blowing stuff up. At the driving range you get to hit time-delayed exploding golf balls at moving targets--everything from armadillos to hot-air balloons. I felt the game required intensive night testing at my home laboratory, as well as further experimentation under office conditions. My problem was remembering to carry the disc back and forth. The obvious solution? Make a copy.

As it turns out, there's never been a better time to buy a recordable CD-ROM drive. An appliance that until quite recently rarely made it out of the turbo-geek community has suddenly gone mainstream and is now an option--and in some cases, a standard--on desktop PCs. Even IBM has begun shipping them on selected models.

Some 20 million recordable CD drives are expected to sell in the U.S. this year, three times as many as last year. Partly, that's owing to ever falling costs; you can now get a decent one for $250 or less. Another reason is the spread of MP3, the hugely popular standard for downloading music online. What better way to store your MP3 collection than on CDs? Blank CD-R discs (which can record only once) cost about $2 each and hold 650 MB of data. If you figure an average of 5 MB per MP3 tune, one disc holds about 130 songs. By any measure, that's a lot of tuneage.

I've been testing IBM's Aptiva E Series 585, which shipped to retail stores last week. At $1,899 (a monitor costs extra), the 500-MHz Pentium III desktop PC has the usual amenities, but comes with an internal Sony CD-RW drive. RW is industry jargon for rewriteable, which means it can handle discs that can be recorded over and over again, just like a floppy disc. CD-RW discs, however, tend to cost about $10 each and can be flaky, as I soon learned.

I loaded the golf-game disc in the DVD bay and put a blank CD-RW disc in the recordable drive. Adaptec's "CD-burning" software (Easy CD, Creator and Direct CD) was pre-installed on the PC and started automatically. Following the on-screen prompts, I created a duplicate of my game in about an hour. When the copy was made, the drive automatically ejected the disc, which I popped into my briefcase and took home to my top-secret night lab.

At first my home PC couldn't read the disc. After a few tries, however, it started working. Go figure. Even more curious was that it took more than 20 minutes to install the program on my hard drive. When I used the original discs on a similar machine at work, it took less than five minutes. Why? It turns out that CD-RW discs use a less reflective material than CD-R discs, which makes them harder to read on older drives. Indeed, if your CD-ROM drive is more than a year old, it may not be able to read your CD-RW disc at all.

Something similar happened when I started duping music CDs. I made a copy of Art Pepper's Smack Up, but it didn't work in my 18-month-old portable CD player. The solution was a CD-R disc, which can hold up to 74 minutes of audio and worked just fine on my portable player, my PC and my Mac. You'll have to go to the Net to find conversion software that allows you to burn MP3s onto CDs and play them in your Discman, however. None was included. Why? Why? Why? I never got a good answer, but I worked out my frustrations on the exploding driving range.

To learn more about burning CDs, see our website at timedigital.com Questions for Quittner? E-mail him at [email protected]