Known problems with MakeCD drivers

There are some known problems with some MakeCD drivers and drives. They are listed here. Usually, they are not fatal.

Using driver "CDR_JVC_Teac":

JVC drives (we tested the JVC XR-W2010) can cause a lot of trouble. If you own a JVC CD writer, try it and be happy if it works, but don't blame us if it does not work.

JVC XR-W2010 V1.51:

• With our first tries, the JVC XR-W2010 didn't work with an oktagon.device V6.8 and a omniscsi.device V6.11. It always rejected the first write command with an ILLEGAL COMMAND error.
  This turned out to be a very strange SCSI or heating problem. The drive works now when connected to the Oktagon with no other device on this SCSI chain.
  Other sources state that our problem might have been caused by a not so good media. Hmm...
• This drive is a very bad CD and CD-R reader. We could not even read data or audio tracks, which the drive wrote by itself, although they are read well by a Yamaha CDR 100 and a Matsushita CD-ROM drive. The JVC XR-W2010 even produced a lot of read errors with normal (pressed) CDs.
  If your drive has the same problem, this will have the following consequences:
  1. Multisession merging often will not work properly, because the previous tracks have to be scanned with the CD writer.
  2. Mode 2 recognition can fail and therefore XA CD-Rs can be fixed with the wrong TOC type.
  3. The name of ISO tracks can not always be read.
• Once we made a test with one very full CD-R, and the drive reported a start block which was higher than the end block. We wrote another track and both last tracks were listed correctly afterwards. Again, we wrote another track, and it was listed wrong again -- and writing a 4th track fixed the problem again. Very strange.
  When we put the same CD-R, which showed the wrong track start in the JVC XR-W2010, into a Yamaha CDR 100, it was listed correctly. Putting it back to the JVC XR-W2010 showed wrong values again.
  You cannot fix a CD-R with invalid track starts with the JVC XR-W2010. You have to use either a different CD writer or write more tracks and hope that this will fix the problem.

Using driver "CDR_Plextor":

Using device CDR_Plextor CD-R PX-R24CS V1.50:

Using device Ricoh RO-1420C:

Using device Ricoh RS-1420C:

• Session information may not be read properly depending on the firmware version.

Using driver "CDR_Sony":

Using device SONY CD-R CDU926S 1.0a ( Jan23):

• The writer seems to be unable to accept buffer chunks of more than approx. 240kB. It rejects the write command with ILLEGAL FIELD IN COMMAND DESCRIPTOR. You have to reduce the chunk size in the settings.
• The writer is not able to write XA tracks with a blocksize of 2048 (form 1) or 2328 (form 2). Therefore only the general mode 2 type is supported by MakeCD. You will be warned and may ignore the warning, but until a firmware supports this block sizes the writer will reject some commands as illegal.
• The Sony writer are very accurate regarding CD-ROM standards. You will not be able to write certain track types after some others (but you won't want to anyway). Example of impossible combinations: Mode 1 (data) + Mode 2.
• The writer seems to be unable to simulate fixation. The testmode can really be enabled for writing tracks, but has no effect on fixation. The CDR_Sony.driver will therefore _not_ issue the fixation command if testmode is enabled. If other Sony CD writers behave differently, tell us.

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