GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

CD-RW

Rewritable CD's (identified as CD-RWs) can, obviously, be rewritten. While they remain a little more expensive that CD-Rs (perhaps twice the cost) they can be reused many times. But note that not all home audio CD players can read CD-RWs. One that can is the Marantz CD5000.

Burning a CD-RW is essentially no different to burning a CD-R. In fact cdrdao identified the CD-RW correctly and dropped its recoding speed down to 4x to suit the CD-RW, all automatically.

To re-record the CD-RW you need to blank it first. With cdrdao this is done with:

  $ cdrdao blank

Although the command returns quite quickly the blanking process continues for quite some time while it performs a long write (you can instead do a minimal blank with the option -blank-mode minimal. After this has completed you can burn to the CD-RW as if it were a new blank CD-R.