Media Longitevity/Care

Guy wrote: I was assuming a "normal" CD-writer, which can't be assumed to support raw writes. Many CD-writers don't, and some that do claim to support raw writes do so incorrectly. If you can do raw writes, you can guarantee the alignment of the "data" to the subcode framing. Otherwise (with a non-raw-write-capable drive, you cannot, and thus you can't predict the complete details of the actual EFM sequence that will be written to disc. Though to be fair, that only will affect 14 channel code bits out of every 1372. But even after you've done all that, you're not going to find a way to generate any channel data pattern that is significantly more succeptible to externally induced error (e.g., oxidation) than what you will get Why? I hacked my own software to read a CD based on raw preamp output, in order to investigate copy-protected discs, but what would the point be in developing anything that could generated a desired EFM channel pattern from application-level data, unless you were developing or validating a CD writer? Eric