Overview (by Paul Raines and Tony Harris):

The CD writing processing involves dividing up your data to write in
groups of 650MB or less. For each group you create an image file on
the a local disk area of the machine with the CD writer you will use.
This is a single file that contains a file system inside it, just like
a directory tree. All of your data is here, with the directory
structure preserved. This single file is what is written to the
CD. Write the image to the CD. Do not run CPU intensive jobs on the CD
writer machine while the write is in progress, or your write might
fail.

It is important that the image file be written to local disk on the CD
writer machine.  On parvo, use the /scratch disk.  If you try to burn
image files from filesystems over the network, random network delays
might cause your write session to the CD to fail.

Steps:

(1) Divide the data you want to write into independent directory
    trees each with 650MB or less.  You can use the 'du -sk' command
    to see how large a directory tree is.  For example:

  $ cd /space/sake/3/users/inverse/subjects/nouchine
  $ pwd
  /space/sake/3/users/inverse/subjects/nouchine
  $ du -sk .
  418196	.
  

    Note that to avoid symlink issues, I cd'ed into the directory itself.
    In unix, the '.' means the current directory. This subject is
    418MB so I only need one image.

(2) Create cd image using 'mkisofs' into scratch space local to the 
    computer you are using that has enough space.  For example:

   $ cd /space/sake/3/users/inverse/subjects/nouchine
   $ mkisofs -T -J -R -hfs -map /usr/local/lib/hfs.map -o /scratch/nouchine.img .

    IMPORTANT: notice the "." at the end of the last command.  

    Again, to avoid symlink issues, I cd'ed into the top of the directory
    structure to make an image from.

(3)  Check that image (optional) 
     Make sure it contains the data you want and the size is < 650Mb

   $ mkdir /scrach/nouchine.dsk
   $ sudo mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop /scratch/nouchine.img /scrach/nouchine.dsk
   $ ls /scrach/nouchine.dsk
   $ sudo umount /scrach/nouchine.dsk

(4)  Record image to disk.  The dev option below depends on whether you
     are running RedHat 7.x or Fedora Core 2.  For RedHat users:

   $ /usr/bin/cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,5,0  -data  /scratch/nouchine.img

     The dev parameter is:
     dev   =   scsi dev number, scs ID number, LUN
     This info comes from `cdrecord -scanbus` so run this command to
     find the correct parameters for your CD writer

   For Fedora users, just use 'dev=/dev/cdwriter' instead

     REMEMBER! Do not run any CPU intensive jobs while this is running.

(5) Examine cd for data integrity

   $ sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrw /scratch/nouchine.dsk
   $ ls /scrach/nouchine.dsk
   $ sudo umount /scrach/nouchine.dsk

(6) Clean up

   $ /bin/rm -rf /scratch/nouchine.*

------------------------------------------------------------------

To make audio CDs:


for file in `ls *.aiff`
 do
   echo sox $file ${file%%.aiff}.cdr
   sox $file ${file%%.aiff}.cdr
done


echo cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,5,0 -audio *.cdr


To make a CD from mp3s:

for file in *.mp3
  do
     mpg123 --cdr - "$file" | cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,5,0 -audio -pad -nofix -
  done
cdrecord -fix

======================
DVD WRITING

For DVD-R or other media, use the latest cdrecord.  Run

  cdrecord -version

and make sure you have 2.01a27-dvd.  If not, contact help@nmr to
get it installed.  They you can write to DVD's just like for CD's
described above.

Writing to DVD+RW media should be done with the growisofs command. 
Info on this command is at:

http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

Skip all the first parts about kernels and installation.  THe parts
about formatting and running growisofs are the only things you need to
look at (look for "Burning with growisofs")

Basically instead of burning an ISO image with cdrecord like for
a CDRW, you do:

  growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=imagefile.iso

If you need to erase a RW dvd disk (not normally needed) do:

  dvd+rw-format -force -blank=full /dev/scd0

For Fedora users, replace /dev/scd0 with /dev/cdwriter