Master Advice Needed

[Carlos Mills]

Hi All,

I've been asked to master a CD that will also contain a little executable (*.exe) file attached to it, tobe used both as an AUDIO CD and a CD-ROM. Did anybody here ever did it? Any tips about the best way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance for your help.

[Mark Stebbeds]

Hi All,

I've been asked to master a CD that will also contain a little executable (*.exe) file attached to it, tobe used both as an AUDIO CD and a CD-ROM. Did anybody here ever did it? Any tips about the best way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance for your help.

Nero has that menu option, and it seems very easy, but I've never tried it.

Mark

[TotalSonic]

You can do this in Nero (among other programs) by choosing to burn either a "CD-EXTRA" (aka CD-XA - the XA stands for "eXtended Architecture") or a "Mixed Mode" CD.

I'd go with burning a CD-EXTRA instead of Mixed Mode as this way the data section is placed second (instead of the data coming first in Mixed Mode) so that if someone plays the disc on an older player that doesn't ignore the data they are not greeted with horrid noise as the player attempts to "play" the data. With CD-XA the data section will be nicely hidden from any standard CD player.

Also - if they need to have the data section be cross platform compatible (i.e. have a program installer work for both Mac and PC off of it) then I believe you need to use a Mac based app like Toast or Jam in order to burn the disc as the data must come off an HFS formatted drive and written with the Mac compatible app or else you'll lose the resource forks when the data file is copied to the disc image. I've never tried this but I think it might be able to get around this by using the latest versions of Nero, MacDrive and an HFS formatted drive or partition on your PC. If you're just loading the data section with cross platform compatible files like jpegs, Quicktime movies or html (and not program installers) then this is a non-issue and just burning the disc with a CD-XA or Mixed Mode compatible app will work fine.

To automatically launch on PC's the exe file included on the disc you'll need to write and include an autorun.inf file in the data section of the disc. A basic tutorial on how to write the autorun.inf file is at http://www.swiftcd.com/faq/autorun.html

Hope that helps.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[canipus]

Also - if they need to have the data section be cross platform compatible (i.e. have a program installer work for both Mac and PC off of it) then I believe you need to use a Mac based app like Toast or Jam in order to burn the disc as the data must come off an HFS formatted drive and written with the Mac compatible app or else you'll lose the resource forks when the data file is copied to the disc image. I've never tried this but I think it might be able to get around this by using the latest versions of Nero, MacDrive and an HFS formatted drive or partition on your PC. If you're just loading the data section with cross platform compatible files like jpegs, Quicktime movies or html (and not program installers) then this is a non-issue and just burning the disc with a CD-XA or Mixed Mode compatible app will work fine.

To automatically launch on PC's the exe file included on the disc you'll need to write and include an autorun.inf file in the data section of the disc. A basic tutorial on how to write the autorun.inf file is at http://www.swiftcd.com/faq/autorun.html



If your platform is a PC you can make true cross platform hybrid image files with Mac Image and then burn the image with any CD/DVD writer client. It's that simple! No need for Mac drive and all that other mumbo jumbo.

[TotalSonic]

If your platform is a PC you can make true cross platform hybrid image files with Mac Image and then burn the image with any CD/DVD writer client. It's that simple! No need for Mac drive and all that other mumbo jumbo.


Good to know - I found this info site on this via Google -

http://www.macdisk.com/macimgen.php3

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[Carlos Mills]

Hi Guys,

So it seems that the best way to accomplish this is by using Nero as the final burner... I was looking for a way to make it with EAC, but it seems not to be possible... I will keep researching... Thanks very much for your help...
EDIT: you pointed out very valuable information, as usual...!