darkness

I think there was a bunch I wanted to write about. By now I’ve forgotten a lot of it, I think. It’s more of a feeling.

Over the past week we’ve been on a quest for cheap CD-RW drives at OfficeMax. They advertised an I/O Magic 48x16x48 (48x CD-R, 16x CD-RW, 48x read) CD-RW drive for about $20 after rebates. They ran out of stock of the I/O Magic drives pretty quickly, but since they apparently have to provide the drive for the lifetime of the sales flyer’s prices (from the previous Sunday to the next Saturday, one week) they have “alternatives.” The first alternative they’d give out to the I/O Magic drive was a Pacific Digital 48x12x48. This drive is obviously slower at CD-RW, but to even this out it’s $20 without having to do any rebates. The second alternative was a Cendyne 48x12x48. Still slower, and it probably costs more up front since I think it has a larger mail-in rebate than the I/O Magic. Note that the end price is the same on all these drives: $20 after rebates, if any.

I decided to find out about the features of these drives. I checked CloneCD’s site first for information. I also found cdfreaks.com quite helpful, often returning hits from Google. Andy McFadden’s CD-Recordable FAQ was also of some use in identifying the drives. You see, these drives often aren’t made by the name on the box. They’re remarked drives from other equipment manufacturers. I don’t know what the I/O Magic drive is, but I didn’t look very hard. The Pacific Digital drive is a Lite-On LTR-48125W, which is a featureful drive according to CloneCD’s feature list and other sources on the Internet. These drives seem to be as quality as they get for the price.

Then there’s the Cendyne burner. Cendyne decided to make it real tough by including one of at least three (and probably more like four or five; I heard BenQ burners mentioned a bunch) different burners in the same box. These burners are the OptoRite CW 4802 (48x16x48), an A/Open 48x12x50, and the Lite-On LTR-48125W mentioned above. The OptoRite CW 4802 seems to be widely criticized out on the Internet. The A/Open doesn’t sound much better. The Lite-On is the best of the three it seems. The good news is that the Cendyne drives have a big sticker on the back that has a “Drive Model” portion. This portion will say “CW 4802″ for the OptoRite, “LTR-48125W” (or similar) for the Lite-On, and the pictured sticker is for the A/Open. Of the five or so OfficeMax stores I called they all seemed to be willing to look through their drives for ones that had a model number beginning with “LTR”. The bad news is that only one of those five stores had any, the rest having only OptoRite and/or A/Open drives.

Before I knew all this I went out and got a Cendyne drive. At the time I was actually happier to get a Cendyne drive than a Pacific Digital, despite the rebate details, because I thought they were all Lite-On drives; a sure thing, so-to-speak. When I got it home I was surprised to find the drive saying 48x16x48 on the front while the box said 48x12x48 in several places. Once I found out this was an OptoRite, and only one place in town had a Lite-On drive, I drove the 25m or so out there to pick one up. When I got there they said they only had Pacific Digital. I didn’t know anything about these drives at the time, and I couldn’t find anything tell-tale on the box, but it was $20 straight out so I took it.

There are about four differences I would say exist between these drives besides the speeds. First is media compatibility. The OptoRite drive wouldn’t write to my cheap media, but the Lite-On did – and that was before I installed new firmware which supposedly increased media compatibility. (More on flashing below.) Second, Mt. Rainier packet writing support. I don’t use packet writing, so I probably wouldn’t use this, but it might be of note to mention that the A/Open and OptoRite drives apparently don’t have this, while the Lite-On apparently does. Third, only the Lite-On drive supposedly has this “Smart-Burn” feature where it writes a bit slower but tries to check your media to make sure it’s getting written to correctly. Finally, apparently the OptoRite drive has problems with certain copy protections that the Lite-On does not.

Apparently the Lite-On I got had Pacific Digital-branded Lite-On firmware on it, and to upgrade to the latest Lite-On firmware I’d have to jump through some hoops. First I went to http://www.liteonit.com.tw/ to download the latest firmware for my drive, VS08 at the time. This provides you with a VS08.EXE file. Don’t run it you trigger-happy little bugger. Now go to http://www.liteon.notrix.net/ and download LITEFIRM2.EXE. This contains a utility that you run on VS08.EXE to get VS08.BIN. From that same page you can download MTKFLASH155.EXE or whatever the latest version of MTKFLASH is. This is a DOS-only utility to upgrade your firmware. I downloaded a boot disk from http://www.bootdisk.com/. Then try and follow the direction in OC-Freak’s MTKFLASH guide. You can ignore the bits in here about overclocking as that doesn’t apply to you with the above drive. Don’t forget to turn off DMA in your BIOS for the CD-RW drive before flashing, and don’t forget to back up your current firmware as recommended before flashing.

One more tip: if you can’t seem to write to your new CD-ROM fast enough, make sure you have DMA enabled in your BIOS (both the OptoRite and the Lite-On seem to do UDMA mode 2 at best) and also make sure you have the best drivers for your IDE controller/motherboard/motherboard chipset you can find. In my case I needed to install the “Intel Application Accelerator”, which is secretly busmastering IDE drivers for the 815E chipset (and some others, I believe). You can find these at Intel’s site. For the record, my motherboard is an Asus CUSL2-C BP.

In other news, I used FLAC for the first time last night. I was going to use Monkey’s Audio, but then I said, “why not use the free alternative?” I was using it in Windows to back-up my Donnie Darko soundtrack working WAV files. FLAC is command line oriented, but it has a couple of front-ends for Windows. It can also used with the Monkey’s Audio GUI as a front-end, which is what I ended up doing. Worked pretty well. I get the feeling FLAC doesn’t compress 24-bit 48KHz audio as well as 16-bit 44.1KHz audio. I saw only a 44% or so decrease in size. Still, it was enough to fit the FLAC files on to a single 80m CD. Glitch: the process of converting to FLAC loses all the markers I had set in the files. Solution: go through each file (yick) and do a “Save As”, telling it to put the markers in a separate .SFL file. I then burned my CD Architect project, the FLAC files, and the .SFL files where applicable, and now I have a backup. This means I can play with trimming, expanding, EQ, reordering tracks, and more without losing what work I’ve already done in some stupid mistake.

Took my Cantenna out to a potentially knowledgeable group of people tonight. They suggested a few reasons it didn’t work well:

1. Use silver solder instead of rosin-core. Or something like that. This one wasn’t emphasized.

2. The element can’t be touching the can. I didn’t know this one. It wasn’t in the how-to, I swear. They suggested I just drill the hole bigger. I’ll probably give that a whirl (with my new drill!).

3. More solder between the N connector extrusion and the element (wire). I thought I had plenty. One or two people disagreed with this. I don’t really agree with this yet, but I might end up trying it. Hopefully only after I’ve enlarged the element’s hole and tested the antenna for improvements at that point. If I try adding more solder I might start with a hole new N connector; not sure yet.

So, there’s some ideas for improvement. I still want one of those obscenely-high-gain directional antennas from FA&B though, I think.