CD-ROM Manager/2 Documentation 

General 

CD-ROM Manager/2 is a program that allows you to adjust certain operating parameters of Plextor (R) CD-ROM drives.

Supported drives 

CD-ROM Manager/2 has been developed and tested with a Plextor PX-12 TSi drive; the following models should also work:
  CD-ROM Manager/2 verifies the SCSI id strings of the drives installed on the system. If a drive is found that is unknown but seems to be a Plextor CD-ROM drive, it is assumed to be a PX-32.

CD-ROM Manager/2 has been verified to work with the following SCSI adapters:

Generally, every adapter with OS/2 driver support should work.
 

Installation 

This is simple: and reboot. Watch out for the line during system startup. If it appears, everything should work.
 

Using CD-ROM Manager/2 

CD-ROM Manager/2 is implemented as a notebook that contains three pages: Below, the currently selected Plextor CD ROM drive is displayed with its name, SCSI adapter number and SCSI id. If you have more than one Plextor CD ROM, you can use the ´...´ button  to display a dialog where you can select a different drive.
 

Drive

This page displays information about the hardware (firmware revision, SCSI id / adapter number etc.) and provides controls to adjust the reading speed and the spindown time out.

Additionally, the following options are available:

 

Medium

The "Medium" page displays information about the currently inserted CD - this includes the size of the CD and a track directory containing the tracks' sizes and types -  and can be used to play and dump audio tracks.

This page contains the following buttons:
 
Rescans the track directory of the CD and updates the TOC list
Starts audio playback of the first selected audio track
Stops audio playback
Dumps the selected audio tracks (see below)
The last three buttons are disabled if there is no audio track selected.
 

Dumping audio tracks

Pressing the 'Dump' button will open a dialog where you can type the desired path and filename prefix for the WAV files the tracks are stored in. The 'Browse' button to the right will open a file dialog where you can browse the drives and directories on your system.
Below, the required and available space is displayed. If you change the drive in the entry field, the available space is updated accordingly. If it's not enough, it is displayed in red.

Notes:

 

Audio

The Audio page allows you to adjust the audio volume used for playing audio CDs, and where the two stereo channels should be mapped to.
Use the slider to adjust the volume and the two buttons below to change the audio channel mapping. If you click one of the buttons, its label is going to change to display the new mapping for the channel.
 

Command line parameters 

CD-ROM Manager/2  supports several command line parameters so you can restore settings automatically. For example, you could include a call to ´cdmgr.exe´ in your STARTUP.CMD file with the desired command line parameters to restore settings of your choice.

The following parameters are supported:
 
    -q 
    quiet mode - do not display any error messages 
    -c 
    continue after executing command line arguments (display PM window) 
    -d 
    1 based CD-ROM drive index (as displayed in the drive list box in CD-ROM Manager/2); arguments following a -d switch are used for the drive specified. 
    -s 
    set speed in multiples of 150k/sec 
    requires desired speed factor as second parameter (i.e. '8' for 8x speed) 
    -t 
    set spindown time out 
    requires desired time out value as second parameter. Possible values are: 
    125 125 ms
    250 250ms
    500 500ms
    1s 1 sec
    2s 2 sec
    4s 4 sec
    8s 8 sec
    16s 16 sec
    32s 32 sec
    1m 1 min
    2m 2 min (default value)
    4m 4 min
    8m 8 min
    16m 16 min
    32m 32 min
    0 infinite
     
    -v 
    set audio volume in per cent (second parameter) 
    -n 
-dw 
    set "Immediate read"(DisWt) bit 
    requires on (1) / off (0) flag as second parameter
 

Example:

This example does not display eventual errors (-q), sets a speed value of 8x (-s 8), a time out value of 8 minutes (-t 8m), an audio volume of 90 per cent (-v 90) and sets the no auto speed down flag to true. The second CDROM drive is set to a reading speed of 4x and forced to start reading immediately (before 4x speed is reached).

If you start CD-ROM Manager/2 with any of these command line parameters, no window will be displayed and the program will exit after adjusting the values specified (except if you specifed the -c (continue) flag).
 

Errors 

Since I do not like message boxes ("Are you sure you want to close this program?"), CD-ROM Manager/2 only displays them on fatal errors, i.e. out of memory or if the OS2ASPI.DMD or CDMGRDRV.SYS have not been loaded.
When you change a parameter, CD-ROM Manager/2 sets the new value and requeries the value right afterwards.  So if an error occurs, you won't be able to adjust a setting since the according control will just pop back (this does not apply to the audio volume slider, so if adjusting the volume does not work, you will notice this only from the missing effect).
 

Default values 

These are the factory default values for the parameters you can adjust with CD-ROM Manager/2:  

Bug reports 

Please send detailed bug reports to mjm5@csi.com. Mails like "The program does not work" are useless and a waste of your (and my) time.
 

Suggestions 

Suggestions are always welcome. I will try to answer every mail, although it might take a couple of days. Please be assured I will read any mail I receive (except for "wanna earn a million bucks in a month?" subjects <g>). Send your suggestion to mjm5@csi.com.
 

Copyright 

This program is Copyright (C) 1998 by Markus Mueller and Christian Mueller. Please read the license info.
Plextor is a registered trade mark of Plextor Corp. Please visit their american or european homepage.