Time for another rant at stuff, methinks. It's DirectCD burning stuff. They say that it enables you to burn in multiple sessions, on the go. This is good. All you do (in theory) is drag and drop files onto a disc, and as and when you have finished transferring stuff, if you want it publicly distributable (i.e. any muppet with a CD-ROM drive can steal the data) then you just close the disc, and it tacks on a few sectors of code telling the aforementioned muppet where thbe data is all located - essentially it writes a generally legible directory file.

What they also tell you is that if you _don't_ close the disc, you will get well shafted if you try to put it in a standard CD-ROM drive. However, if you have a CD-R/RW drive, you can read it. Excellent. :-))

What no fucker tells you ever is that if you try to close the disc and it says 'problems but done it', it has not only not written the directory file, but it has deleted the existing directory that allowed it to be read in a CD-R drive. This is shite.

Way round - stick it in a Mac, ideally in a CD-R/RW drive, and hope like Christ that the cd-burner of your choice (I like Toast 5.1.1., mainly because it is less likely to freeze up my computer when it has finished burning.) will recognise enough data that you can export it. This can then be looked at with ResEdit and tweaked to reveal a directory listing. This is good. Now, hopefully, you can stick this on the CD, reboot, and all will be well.

In my particular case, I got screwed. Only able to retrieve half the files on the disc by copying the resource forks one at a time to a new document which you then save on the hard disk. Fortunately, I didn't lose any that I hadn't got.

</Rant> 0009/29/08/2002