wodim(1)

📦
version 1.1.11 · 3 versions
, in alpine 3.24, debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💿 wodim(1) 💿

okay bestie, welcome to the manual page for wodim, section 1, user commands. she's a CD/DVD burning icon and she's about to tell you everything. 💅

🎀 NAME 🎀

wodim — write data to optical disk media. that's it, that's the whole job. ✨

📜 SYNOPSIS 📜

wodim [options] track1...trackn

🫶 NOTE 🫶

okay so, there may be similarities and differences between this program and other disk recording application(s). if you wanna know where wodim actually came from, go read the CREDITS and AUTHORS sections below. 👑

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

wodim is used to record data or audio Compact Discs on an Orange Book CD-Recorder, or to write DVD media on a DVD-Recorder. 🔥

the device is the device file or label offered by the operating system to access the recorder with the SCSI GENERIC (sg) interface. heads up: some operating systems may provide separate device nodes for block-oriented access and for sg access. for example, on older Linux systems, the sg access was available through /dev/sg... files, while the block oriented access was done through associated (but not identical) /dev/hd... and /dev/sr... (or /dev/scd...) files. 🦋

in any case, the user running wodim needs read and write access to the particular device file on a Linux system. it is recommended to be root, or to install the application as suid-root, because certain versions of Linux (kernel) limit the set of SCSI commands allowed for non-root users. even if usage without root identity is possible in many cases, some device drivers still may fail, show unexplainable problems, and generally the problems become harder to debug. the risk for buffer-underruns is also increased. see the PROCESS SCHEDULING PRIORITY section below for more details. 😭

there is an alternative way of specifying the device, using the traditional SCSI descriptions in form of devicetype:bus/target/lun specification. however, the success of this method is not guaranteed, since it requires an adaptation scheme for your architecture, and the numbers may vary depending on the hardware-internal numbering or on the order of hot-plug device detection. if your operating system does not provide a sufficient framework for keeping this numbers persistent, don't rely on them. see -scanbus and --devices options below for details. 💀

there are emulated SCSI compatible device systems too, using the SCSI protocols transported over various hardware/media types. the most known examples is ATAPI ("IDE burners") or USB storage ("external USB case"). if the pseudo-SCSI b/t/l device address specification is used instead of the native one, you need to prepend the "devicetype:" description to the emulated "bus/target/lun" device address. 🌈

if a file /etc/wodim.conf exists, the parameter to the dev= option may also be a drive name label in that file (see FILES section). 📁

as a special exception, the device specification can be -1, or just omitted, which invokes automatic guessing of an appropriate device for the selected operation. but bestie... this guessing is not available everywhere and is not reliable; it is only available for the user's convenience in simple environments. 🙈

in Track At Once mode, each track corresponds to a single file that contains the prepared data for that track. if the argument is -, standard input is used for that track. only one track may be taken from stdin. in the other write modes, the direct file to track relation may not be implemented. in -clone mode, a single file contains all data for the whole disk. to allow DVD writing on platforms that do not implement large file support, wodim concatenates all file arguments to a single track when writing to DVD media. 💅

⏰ PROCESS SCHEDULING PRIORITY ⏰

wodim tries to get higher process priority using different methods. this is important because the burn process is usually a realtime task, and no long delays should occur while transmitting fresh data to the recorder. this is especially important on systems with insufficient RAM, where swapping can create delays of many seconds. 😭

a possible workaround on underpowered systems is the use of the burnfree or similar feature, allowing the recorder to resume. 🫶

root permissions are usually required to get higher process scheduling priority. 👑

on SVr4 compliant systems, wodim uses the real time class to get the highest scheduling priority that is possible (higher than all kernel processes). on systems with POSIX real time scheduling, wodim uses real time scheduling too, but may not be able to gain a priority that is higher than all kernel processes. ⭐

in order to be able to use the SCSI transport subsystem of the OS, run at highest priority and lock itself into core, wodim either needs to be run as root, needs to be installed suid root, or must be called via RBACs pfexec mechanism. 💜

✨ GENERAL OPTIONS ✨

general options must be before any track file name or track option. periodt. 🎀

  • -version — print version information and exit. bye bestie 💖
  • -v — increment the level of general verbosity by one. this is used e.g. to display the progress of the writing process. 👀
  • -V — increment the verbose level in respect of SCSI command transport by one. this helps to debug problems during the writing process, that occur in the CD/DVD-Recorder. if you get incomprehensible error messages you should use this flag to get more detailed output. -VV will show data buffer content in addition. using -V or -VV slows down the process and may be the reason for a buffer underrun. 💀
  • debug=#, -d — set the misc debug value to # (with debug=#) or increment the misc debug level by one (with -d). if you specify -dd, this equals to debug=2. this may help to find problems while opening a driver for libusal as well as with sector sizes and sector types. using -debug slows down the process and may be the reason for a buffer underrun. 🐛
  • kdebug=#, kd=# — tell the usal-driver to modify the kernel debug value while SCSI commands are running. 🧚
  • -silent, -s — do not print out a status report for failed SCSI commands. 🤫
  • -force — force to continue on some errors. be careful when using this option. wodim implements several checks that prevent you from doing unwanted things like damaging CD-RW media by improper drives. many of the sanity checks are disabled when the -force option is used. ⚠️

this option also implements some tricks that will allow you to blank bad CD-RW disks. 💅

  • -immed — tell wodim to set the SCSI IMMED flag in certain commands (load/eject/blank/close_track/close_session). this can be useful on broken systems with ATAPI harddisk and CD/DVD writer on the same bus, or with SCSI systems that don't use disconnect/reconnect. these systems will freeze while blanking or fixating a CD/DVD, or while a DVD writer is filling up a session to the minimum amount (approx. 800 MB). setting the -immed flag will request the command to return immediately while the operation proceeds in background, making the bus usable for the other devices and avoiding the system freeze. this is an experimental feature which may work or not, depending on the model of the CD/DVD writer. a correct solution would be to set up a correct cabling, but there seem to be notebooks around that have been set up the wrong way by the manufacturer. as it is impossible to fix this problem in notebooks, the -immed option has been added. 😭

a second experimental feature of the -immed flag is to tell wodim to try to wait short times while writing to the media. this is expected to free the IDE bus if the CD/DVD writer and the data source are connected to the same IDE cable. in this case, the CD/DVD writer would otherwise usually block the IDE bus for nearly all the time, making it impossible to fetch data from the source drive. see also minbuf= and -v option. 🦋

use both features at your own risk. if it turns out that it would make sense to have a separate option for the wait feature, write to the author and convince him. 🙈

  • minbuf=value — the # minbuf= option allows to define the minimum drive buffer fill ratio for the experimental ATAPI wait mode that is intended to free the IDE bus to allow hard disk and CD/DVD writer to be on the same IDE cable. as the wait mode currently only works when the verbose option -v has been specified, wodim implies the verbose option in case the -immed or minbuf= option have been specified. valid values for minbuf= are between 25 and 95 for 25%...95% minimum drive buffer fill ratio. 🎀
  • -dummy — the CD/DVD-Recorder will go through all steps of the recording process, but the laser is turned off during this procedure. it is recommended to run several tests before actually writing to a Compact Disk or Digital Versatile Disk, if the timing and load response of the system is not known. 🧪
  • -clone — tells wodim to handle images created by readom -clone. the -clone may only be used in conjunction with the -raw96r or with the -raw16 option. using -clone together with -raw96r is preferred as it allows to write all subchannel data. the option -raw16 should only be used with drives that do not support to write in -raw96r mode. 👯
  • -dao, -sao — set SAO (Session At Once) mode which is usually called Disk At Once mode. this currently only works with MMC drives that support Session At Once mode. note that wodim needs to know the size of each track in advance for this mode (see the genisoimage -print-size option and the EXAMPLES section for more information). 📀
  • -tao — set TAO (Track At Once) writing mode. this is the default write mode in previous wodim versions. with most drives, this write mode is required for multi session recording. 🔥
  • -raw — set RAW writing mode. using this option defaults to -raw96r. note that wodim needs to know the size of each track in advance for this mode (see the genisoimage -print-size option and the EXAMPLES section for more information). ⭐
  • -raw96r — okay this one's the ✨fancy✨ raw writing mode, bestie. It selects RAW writing with 2352 byte sectors plus 96 bytes of raw P-W subchannel data, which means the sector size comes out to 2448 bytes. This is the preferred raw writing mode because it gives you the best possible control over the whole CD writing process. 🎀

And listen — if you're seeing weird stuff like a janky disk layout or wrong subchannel content (like the display showing wrong times while the CD plays), and your drive can do -raw96r or -raw16, you should literally give it a try. There are genuinely CD writers out there with bad firmware that produce broken disks when writing in TAO or SAO mode. 😭

⚠️ Writing data disks in raw mode needs significantly more CPU time than other write modes. If your CPU is too slow, this may result in buffer underruns. And heads up: wodim needs to know the size of each track in advance for this mode (check the genisoimage -print-size option and the EXAMPLES section for more info).

  • -raw96p — the raw mode with 2352 byte sectors plus 96 bytes of packed P-W subchannel data, giving a sector size of 2448 bytes. This is the less preferred raw writing mode because only a few recorders even support it, and some of those recorders have buggy firmware implementations of it. 💀 So like — don't use this mode if your recorder supports -raw96r or -raw16.

⚠️ Same warning as above, no cap: raw mode = significantly more CPU time, and if your CPU is too slow you may get buffer underruns. And wodim still needs the size of each track in advance here (see the genisoimage -print-size option and the EXAMPLES section).

  • -raw16 — selects RAW writing with 2352 byte sectors plus 16 bytes of P-Q subchannel data, so your sector size is 2368 bytes. If a recorder doesn't support -raw96r, this is the preferred raw writing mode. 🫶

The tradeoff, bestie: it does not let you write CD-Text or CD+Graphics. But it's the only raw writing mode available in cheap CD writers — and those cheap writers, in most cases, don't support -dao mode. So don't use this mode if your recorder supports -raw96r. 🎯

⚠️ Again: raw mode writing data disks = significantly more CPU time, possible buffer underruns on a slow CPU, and wodim needs each track's size in advance (see genisoimage -print-size and the EXAMPLES section).

  • -multi — allows multi session CDs to be made. This flag needs to be present on all sessions of a multi session disk… except if you want to create a session that'll be the last session on the media. 🎀 The fixation gets done in a way that lets the CD/DVD-Recorder append additional sessions later, by generating a TOC with a link to the next program area. The media made this way is not 100% compatible with manufactured CDs (except for CDplus). Use only for recording multi session CDs, okay?

If this option is present, the default track type is CD-ROM XA mode 2 form 1 and the sector size is 2048 bytes. The XA sector subheaders are created by the drive. Heads up: Sony drives have no hardware support for CD-ROM XA mode 2 form 1 — you have to specify the -data option to create multi session disks on those drives.

And since wodim doesn't have a coder for converting data sectors to audio sectors, you need to force CD-ROM sectors by including the -data option if you want to record a multisession disk in SAO mode. Also: not all drives allow multisession CDs in SAO mode. 🙈

  • -msinfo — retrieves multi session info in a form suitable for genisoimage and prints it to standard output. See the msifile= option for another version. ✨

This option only makes sense with a CD that contains at least one closed session and is appendable (not finally closed yet). Some drives will throw error messages if you try to get the multi session info for a disk that isn't suitable for this operation. 😭

  • msifile=filename — like the -msinfo option but it also stores the multi session info in a file. 🎀
  • -toc — retrieves and prints out the table of content or PMA of a CD. With this option, wodim will work with CD-R drives and with CD-ROM drives. 👑
  • -atip — retrieves and prints out the ATIP (absolute Time in Pre-groove) info of a CD/DVD recordable or CD/DVD re-writable media. With this option, wodim will try to retrieve the ATIP info.

If the actual drive doesn't support reading the ATIP info, it may be that only a reduced set of information records gets displayed — or literally nothing at all. 🙈 Only a limited number of MMC compliant drives support reading the ATIP info.

If wodim is able to retrieve the lead-in start time for the first session, it'll try to decode and print the manufacturer info from the media. DVD media doesn't have ATIP information, but there's equivalent prerecorded information that gets read out and printed. 💅

  • -fix — the disk will only be fixated (i.e. a TOC for a CD-Reader will be written). This may be used if, for some reason, the disk has been written but not fixated. ⚠️ This option currently does not work with old TEAC drives (CD-R50S and CD-R55S).
  • -nofix — do not fixate the disk after writing the tracks. This may be used to create an audio disk in steps. 🎧 An un-fixated disk usually can't be used on a non CD-writer type drive — but there are audio CD players that will be able to play such a disk. Slay.
  • -waiti — wait for input to become available on standard input before trying to open the SCSI driver. This allows wodim to read its input from a pipe even when writing additional sessions to a multi session disk. 🫶 When writing another session to a multi session disk, genisoimage needs to read the old session from the device before writing output — and that can't be done if wodim opens the SCSI driver at the same time.
  • -load — load the media and exit. This only works with a tray loading mechanism, but it seems to be useful when using the Kodak disk transporter. 🎀
  • -lock — load the media, lock the door and exit. This also only works with a tray loading mechanism, but again — useful with the Kodak disk transporter.
  • -eject — eject disk after doing the work. Some devices (e.g. Philips) need to eject the medium before creating a new disk. On these devices, doing a -dummy test and immediately creating a real disk would not work. 💀
  • speed=# — set the speed factor of the writing process to #. # is an integer representing a multiple of the audio speed. For reference: about 150 KB/s for CD-ROM, about 172 KB/s for CD-Audio, and about 1385 kB/s for DVD media. 🌈

If no speed option is present, wodim tries to get a drive specific speed value from the file /etc/wodim.conf — and if it can't find one there, it'll try the speed value from the CDR_SPEED environment variable, and later from the CDR_SPEED= entry in /etc/wodim.conf. If no speed value could be found at all, wodim uses a drive specific default speed. For all new (MMC compliant) drives, the default is to use the maximum supported by the drive. If you use speed=0 with a MMC compliant drive, wodim will switch to the lowest possible speed for the drive and medium. And if you're on an old (non MMC) drive that has problems with speed=2 or speed=4, you should try speed=0. 👑

  • blank=type — blank a CD-RW and exit, or blank a CD-RW before writing. The blanking type may be one of:
    • help — display a list of possible blanking types.
    • all — blank the entire disk. This may take a long time. 😭
    • fast — minimally blank the disk. This results in erasing the PMA, the TOC and the pregap.
    • track — blank a track.
    • unreserve — unreserve a reserved track.
    • trtail — blank the tail of a track.
    • unclose — unclose last session.
    • session — blank the last session.

Not all drives support all blanking types. It may be necessary to use blank=all if a drive reports a specified command as being invalid. ⚠️ If used together with the -force flag, this option may be used to blank CD-RW disks that otherwise cannot be blanked. Note that you may need to specify blank=all because some drives will not continue with certain types of bad CD-RW disks. Note also that wodim does its best if the -force flag is used — but it finally depends on the drive's firmware whether the blanking operation succeeds or not. Periodt.

  • -format — format a CD-RW/DVD-RW/DVD+RW disc. Formatting is currently only implemented for DVD+RW media. A 'maiden' DVD+RW media needs to be formatted before you may write to it. However — wodim autodetects the need for formatting in this case and auto formats the medium before it starts writing, so the -format option is only needed if you'd like to forcibly reformat a DVD+RW medium. 💅
  • fs=# — set the FIFO (ring buffer) size to #. You may use the same syntax as in dd(1), sdd(1) or star(1). The number representing the size is taken in bytes unless otherwise specified. If a number is followed directly by the letter b, k, m, s or f, the size is multiplied by 512, 1024, 1024*1024, 2048 or 2352. If the size consists of numbers separated by x or *, multiplication of the two numbers is performed. So fs=10x63k specifies a FIFO size of 630 kBytes. ✨

The size specified by the fs= argument includes the shared memory that's needed for administration. That's at least one page of memory. If no fs= option is present, wodim will try to get the FIFO size value from the CDR_FIFOSIZE environment variable. The default FIFO size is currently 4 MB. 🎀

Okay so real talk about the FIFO — it's there to give the real-time writing process more room to breathe, buffer-wise. It lets you run a pipe from genisoimage straight into wodim. And here's the slay part: if the FIFO is active and you're piping from genisoimage into wodim to make a CD, wodim will abort before it touches the disk at all if genisoimage dies before writing even starts. Safety first, bestie. 🛡️

The recommended FIFO size is somewhere between 4 and 128 MBytes. Rule of thumb ✨: at least as big as the internal buffer of your CD/DVD-Recorder, and no more than half the physical RAM your machine actually has. If the FIFO is big enough, the FIFO statistics will print a FIFO empty count of zero and the FIFO min fill won't dip below 20%. Chef's kiss. 💅

But don't be greedy with the FIFO space — it is not wise. If you need more than 8 MB to write a CD at a speed less than 20x from an image on a local file system on an idle machine, then ngl your machine is either underpowered, has hardware problems, or is mis-configured. That's the vibe check and it failed. 💀 If you're writing DVDs or CDs at higher speed, it lowkey makes sense to use at least 16 MB for the FIFO.

On old and small machines you gotta be extra careful with the FIFO size, okay? If your machine has less than 256 MB of physical RAM, don't set up a FIFO bigger than 32 MB. And the sun4c architecture (like, e.g. a Sparcstation-2) only has MMU page table entries for 16 MBytes per process. Using more than 14 MBytes for the FIFO may cause the operating system to spend so much time constantly reloading the MMU tables — like it's stuck in a group chat it can't leave. 😭 Newer machines from Sun do not have this MMU hardware problem. There's no information on PC-hardware reflecting this problem. (iykyk, nobody's got the receipts on that one.)

Old Linux systems for non-x86 platforms have broken definitions for the shared memory size. You need to fix them and rebuild the kernel, or manually tell wodim to use a smaller FIFO. Not optional, bestie. 🙈

If you're getting buffer underruns or similar problems (like a constantly empty drive buffer) and you observe a zero fifo empty count, then you have hardware problems that are preventing the data from flowing fast enough from the kernel memory to the drive. The FIFO size in this case is sufficient — it's not the FIFO's fault, she's doing great — but you should check for a working DMA setup. 🧚

  • ts=# — sets the maximum transfer size for a single SCSI command to #. The syntax for the ts= option is the same as for wodim fs=# or sdd bs=#.

If no ts= option has been specified, wodim defaults to a transfer size of 63 kB. If libusal gets lower values from the operating system, the value is reduced to the maximum value that's possible with the current operating system. Sometimes it may help to further reduce the transfer size or to enhance it — but bestie, note that it may take a long time to find a better value by experimenting with the ts= option. Have fun with that. 🎀

  • dev=target — sets the SCSI target for the CD/DVD-Recorder, see notes above. A typical device specification is dev=6,0. You can pass a filename or virtual device name instead of the symbolic SCSI numbers. The correct device/filename in this case can be found in the system specific manuals of the target operating system. On a FreeBSD system without CAM support, you need to use the control device (e.g. /dev/rcd0.ctl). A correct device specification in this case may be dev=/dev/rcd0.ctl:@.

On Linux and Windows 2000/XP, drives are accessible with their device (or drive) names or with the symbolic SCSI numbers — not recommended, because the mapping is not stable and could be completely removed in the future. ⚠️

If no dev option is present, wodim will try to get the device from the CDR_DEVICE environment variable.

If the argument to the dev= option does not contain the characters ,, /, @ or :, it is interpreted as a label name that may be found in the file /etc/wodim.conf (see FILES section).

  • gracetime=# — sets the grace time before starting to write to # seconds. Values below 2 seconds are not recommended — you gotta give the kernel or volume management a chance to learn the new state. Patience, bestie. 🌸
  • timeout=# — sets the default SCSI command timeout value to # seconds. The default SCSI command timeout is the minimum timeout used for sending SCSI commands. If a SCSI command fails due to a timeout, you may try to raise the default SCSI command timeout above the timeout value of the failed command. If the command runs correctly with a raised command timeout, please report the better timeout value and the corresponding command to the author of the program. 🙏 If no timeout option is present, a default timeout of 40 seconds is used.
  • driver=name — lets you manually select a driver for the device. Why does this exist? To let users run wodim with drives that are similar to supported drives but not known directly by wodim. All drives made after 1997 should be MMC standard compliant and thus supported by one of the MMC drivers. It is most unlikely that wodim is unable to find the right driver automatically.
Use this option with extreme care. If a wrong driver is used for a device, the possibility of creating corrupted disks is high. The minimum problem related to a wrong driver is that the speed= or -dummy will not work. 😱

The following driver names are supported:

  • help — to get a list of possible drivers together with a short description. (Handy! 🫶)
  • mmc_cd — the generic SCSI-3/mmc CD-ROM driver, auto-selected whenever wodim finds a MMC compliant drive that does not identify itself to support writing at all, or that only identifies to support media or write modes not implemented in wodim.
  • mmc_cd_dvd — the generic SCSI-3/mmc CD/DVD driver, auto-selected whenever wodim finds a MMC-2 or MMC-3 compliant drive that seems to support more than one medium type and the tray is open or no medium could be found to select the right driver. This driver tries to close the tray, checks the medium found in the tray, and then branches to the driver that matches the current medium. Very main character energy. 👑
  • mmc_cdr — the generic SCSI-3/mmc CD-R/CD-RW driver, auto-selected whenever wodim finds a MMC compliant drive that only supports writing CDs, or a multi system drive that contains a CD as the current medium.
  • mmc_cdr_sony — the generic SCSI-3/mmc CD-R/CD-RW driver, auto-selected whenever wodim would otherwise select the mmc_cdr driver but the device seems to be made by Sony. The mmc_cdr_sony is definitely needed for the Sony CDU 928, because this drive does not completely implement the MMC standard and some of the MMC SCSI commands have to be replaced by Sony proprietary commands. It seems that all Sony drives (even newer ones) still implement the Sony proprietary SCSI commands, so it has not yet become a problem to use this driver for all Sony drives. If you find a newer Sony drive that does not work with this driver, please report. 📢
  • mmc_dvd — the generic SCSI-3/mmc-2 DVD-R/DVD-RW driver, auto-selected whenever wodim finds a MMC-2 or MMC-3 compliant drive that supports writing DVDs and an appropriate medium is loaded. Heads up: there is no Track At Once mode for DVD writers.
  • mmc_dvdplus — the generic SCSI-3/mmc-3 DVD+R/DVD+RW driver, auto-selected whenever one of the DVD+ media types that are incompatible to each other is found. It checks media and then branches to the driver that matches the current medium.
  • mmc_dvdplusr — the generic SCSI-3/mmc-3 DVD+R driver, auto-selected whenever a DVD+R medium is found in an appropriate writer. Note that for unknown reason, the DVD-Plus alliance does not like that there is a simulation mode for DVD+R media. 😭 The author of wodim tries to convince manufacturers to implement a simulation mode for DVD+R and implement support. DVD+R only supports one write mode that is somewhere between Track At Once and Packet writing; this mode is selected in wodim via the -dao/-sao option.
  • mmc_dvdplusrw — the generic SCSI-3/mmc-3 DVD+RW driver, auto-selected whenever a DVD+RW medium is found in an appropriate writer. As DVD+RW media needs to be formatted before its first use, wodim auto-detects this media state and performs a format before it starts to write. Note that for unknown reason, the DVD-Plus alliance does not like that there is a simulation mode nor a way to erase DVD+RW media. 💀 DVD+RW only supports one write mode that is close to Packet writing; this mode is selected in wodim via the -dao/-sao option.
  • cw_7501 — the driver for Matsushita/Panasonic CW-7501, auto-selected when wodim finds this old pre MMC drive. wodim supports all write modes for this drive type. Slay. ✨
  • kodak_pcd_600 — the driver for Kodak PCD-600, auto-selected when wodim finds this old pre MMC drive, which has been the first high speed (6x) CD writer for a long time. This drive behaves similar to the Philips CDD-521 drive.
  • philips_cdd521 — the driver for Philips CDD-521, auto-selected when wodim finds a Philips CDD-521 drive (which is the first CD writer ever made 👑) or one of the other drives that are known to behave similar to this drive. All Philips CDD-521 or similar drives (see other drivers in this list) do not support Session At Once recording.
  • philips_cdd521_old — the driver for the Philips old CDD-521. wodim auto-selects this one the moment it clocks a Philips CDD-521 rocking very old firmware, and that firmware comes with some known limitations. iykyk 💀
  • philips_cdd522 — the driver for Philips CDD-522. Auto-selected when wodim finds a CDD-522, which is the glow-up successor of the 521, or one of its variants with the Kodak label. heads up bestie: wodim does not support Session At Once recording with these drives. no SAO for you 😭
  • philips_dumb — the driver for Philips CDD-521 with pessimistic assumptions, and it is never auto-selected. You pick this one by hand, for drives that behave similar to the Philips CDD-521. manual main character energy 💅
  • pioneer_dws114x — the driver for Pioneer DW-S114X, auto-selected when wodim finds one of the old non MMC CD writers from Pioneer. vintage ✨
  • plasmon_rf4100 — the driver for Plasmon RF 4100, auto-selected when wodim finds this specific variant of the Philips CDD-521.
  • ricoh_ro1060c — the driver for Ricoh RO-1060C, auto-selected when wodim finds this drive. ngl there is no real support for this drive yet 🙈
  • ricoh_ro1420c — the driver for Ricoh RO-1420C, auto-selected when wodim finds a drive with this specific variant of the Philips CDD-521 command set.
  • scsi2_cd — the generic SCSI-2 CD-ROM driver. Auto-selected whenever wodim finds a pre MMC drive that does not support writing, or a pre MMC writer that is not supported by wodim. it's giving backup-bestie energy 👑
  • sony_cdu924 — the driver for Sony CDU-924 / CDU-948, auto-selected whenever wodim finds one of the old pre MMC CD writers from Sony. 🎀
  • teac_cdr50 — the driver for Teac CD-R50S, Teac CD-R55S, JVC XR-W2010, Pinnacle RCD-5020, auto-selected whenever one of those drives is found that is known to the non MMC command set used by TEAC and JVC.
fr fr, note that many drives from JVC will not work, because they do not correctly implement the documented command set, and JVC has been unwilling to fix or document the bugs. 😭

Also, there is no support for the Session At Once write mode yet.

  • tyuden_ew50 — the driver for Taiyo Yuden EW-50, auto-selected when wodim finds a drive with this specific variant of the Philips CDD-521 command set.
  • yamaha_cdr100 — the driver for Yamaha CDR-100 / CDR-102, auto-selected when wodim finds one of the old pre MMC CD writers from Yamaha. And no, there is no support for the Session At Once write mode yet either. 💔
  • cdr_simul — the simulation CD-R driver. It lets you run timing and speed tests with parameters that match the behavior of CD writers. 🧚
  • dvd_simul — the simulation DVD-R driver. Same vibe, but the parameters match the behavior of DVD writers. 🌈

There are two special driver entries in that list: cdr_simul and dvd_simul. These driver entries are designed to make timing tests at any speed, or timing tests for drives that do not support the -dummy option. The simulation drivers implement a drive with a buffer size of 1 MB that can be changed via the CDR_SIMUL_BUFSIZE environment variable. The simulation driver correctly simulates even a buffer underrun condition. And if the -dummy option is present, the simulation is not aborted in case of a buffer underrun. ✨

🎀 driveropts=option list 🎀

Set driver specific options. The options are specified as a comma separated list. To get a list of valid options, use driveropts=help together with the -checkdrive option. And listen — if you like to set driver options without running a typical wodim task, you need to use the -setdropts option in addition, otherwise the command line parser in wodim will complain. 🙈

Currently implemented driver options are:

  • burnfree — turn the support for Buffer Underrun Free writing on. This only works for drives that support Buffer Underrun Free technology, which is available on most drives manufactured in this millennium. This may be called: Sanyo BURN-Proof, Ricoh Just-Link, Yamaha Lossless-Link or similar.
This option is deprecated and is mentioned here for documentation purposes only. The BURN-Free feature is enabled by default if the drive supports it. However, use of BURN-Free may cause decreased burning quality. Therefore it can be useful to disable it for certain purposes, eg. when creating a master copy for mass CD production.
  • noburnfree — turn the support for Buffer Underrun Free writing off.
  • varirec=value — turn on the Plextor VariRec writing mode. The mandatory parameter value is the laser power offset and currently may be selected from -2, -1, 0, 1, 2. In addition, you need to set the write speed to 4 in order to allow VariRec to work. ✨
  • gigarec=value — manage the Plextor GigaRec writing mode. The mandatory parameter value is the disk capacity ratio compared to normal recording and currently may be selected from 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4. If values < 1.0 are used, then the effect is similar to the Yamaha Audio Master Q. R. feature. If values > 1.0 are used, then the disk capacity is increased.

Not all drives support all GigaRec values. When a drive uses the GigaRec feature, the write speed is limited to 8x. 💀

  • audiomaster — turn on the Yamaha Audio Master Q. R. feature, which usually should result in high quality CDs that have less reading problems in Hi-Fi players. As this is implemented as a variant of the Session at Once write mode, it will only work if you select SAO write mode, and there is no need to turn it off. The Audio Master mode will work with a limited speed but may also be used with data CDs. In Audio Master mode, the pits on the CD will be written larger than usual, so the capacity of the medium is reduced when turning this feature on. A 74 minute CD will only have a capacity of 63 minutes if Audio Master is active, and the capacity of an 80 minute CD will be reduced to 68 minutes. 🎀
  • forcespeed — normally, modern drives know the highest possible speed for different media and may reduce the speed in order to grant best write quality. This technology may be called: Plextor PowerRec, Ricoh Just-Speed, Yamaha Optimum Write Speed Control or similar. Some drives (e.g. Plextor, Ricoh and Yamaha) allow to force the drive to use the selected speed even if the medium is so bad that the write quality would be poor. This option tells such a drive to force to use the selected speed regardless of the medium quality.
Use this option with extreme care and note that the drive should know better which medium will work at full speed. The default is to turn forcespeed off, regardless of the defaults of the drive.
  • noforcespeed — turn off the force speed feature.
  • speedread — some ultra high speed drives, such as 48x and faster drives from Plextor, limit the read speed for unknown media to e.g. 40x in order to avoid damaged disks and drives. Using this option tells the drive to read any media as fast as possible.
Be very careful as this may cause the media to break in the drive while reading, resulting in a damaged media and drive! 😭
  • nospeedread — turn off unlimited read speed.
  • singlesession — turn the drive into a single session only drive. This allows you to read defective or non-compliant (illegal) media with extremely non-standard additional (broken/illegal) TOC entries in the TOC from the second or higher session. Some of these disks become usable if only the information from the first session is used.
You need to enable Single Session mode before you insert the defective disk! ⚠️
  • nosinglesession — turn off single session mode. The drive will again behave as usual.
  • hidecdr — hide the fact that a medium might be a recordable medium. This allows you to make CD-Rs look like CD-ROMs, and applications believe that the media in the drive is not a CD-R. sneaky ✨
  • nohidecdr — turn off hiding CD-R media.
  • tattooinfo — use this option together with -checkdrive to retrieve the image size information for the Yamaha DiskT@2 feature. The images always have a line length of 3744 pixel. Line number 0 (radius 0) is mapped to the center of the disk. If you know the inner and outer radius, you will be able to create a pre distorted image that later may appear undistorted on the disk. 🦋
  • tattoofile=name — use this option together with -checkdrive to write an image prepared for the Yamaha DiskT@2 feature to the medium. The file must be a file with raw image B&W data (one byte per pixel) in a size as retrieved by a previous call to tattoofile=name. If the size of the image equals the maximum possible size (3744 x 320 pixel), wodim will use the first part of the file. This first part then will be written to the leftover space on the CD. 💅

Oh and also bestie, note that the image must be mirrored to be readable from the pick up side of the CD. 💿 Don't skip that, fr fr.

  • -setdropts — Sets the driveropts you gave with driveropts=option list, plus the speed of the drive and the dummy flag, and then just dips ✌️. Why would you want this? Because it lets wodim set drive-specific parameters that wodim itself doesn't directly use — think single session mode, hide cdr and stuff like that. It's the move when you want driveropts=option list to actually happen without planning to run a whole typical wodim task. Little drive-tuning side quest, no burning required.
  • -checkdrive — Checks if a driver for the current drive is present, then exits. If the drive is a known drive, wodim exits with exit code 0. So basically a lil vibe check for your hardware 🔍
  • -prcap — Prints the drive capabilities for SCSI-3/mmc compliant drives, as obtained from mode page 0x2A. Heads up on the units tho: values marked with kB use 1000 bytes as a kilo-byte, and values marked with KB use 1024 bytes as a Kilo-byte. Yes, case-sensitive, that's the whole point, don't @ me.
  • -inq — Does an inquiry for the drive, prints the inquiry info, and exits. Just the drive introducing itself, main character behavior 🎤
  • -scanbus — Scans all SCSI devices on all SCSI busses and prints the inquiry strings. This one is your bestie for finding the SCSI address of the CD/DVD-Recorder on a system. If some device types are invisible, try using dev=ATA: or a similar option to give a hint about the device type you're looking for. The numbers printed out as labels are computed by: bus * 100 + target. On platforms and device systems without persistent SCSI number management the results are not reliable, so use the --devices option instead. 💅
  • --devices — Looks for useable devices using the system specific functions, eg. probing with usual device nodes in /dev/*, and displays the detections using symbolic device names in OS specific syntax. Much more trustworthy than -scanbus when your system doesn't keep persistent SCSI numbers around.
  • -reset — Tries to reset the SCSI bus where the CD recorder is located. Spoiler: this does not work on all operating systems. So like, attempt it, but don't be shocked if it ghosts you. 😭
  • -abort — Tries to send an abort sequence to the drive. If you use wodim only, this should never be needed — but other software may leave a drive in an unusable condition, and that's when you call in the rescue squad. Calling wodim -reset may be needed if a previous write has been interrupted and the software did not tell the drive that it will not continue to write. Rude of it, honestly.
  • -overburn — Allows wodim to write more than the official size of a medium. This feature is usually called overburning, and it works because most blank media may hold more space than the official size. Here's the math, bestie, stay with me: the official size of the lead-out area on the disk is 90 seconds (6750 sectors), and a disk usually works if there are at least 150 sectors of lead out — so all media may be overburned by at least 88 seconds (6600 sectors). Most CD recorders only do overburning in SAO or RAW mode. Known exceptions are TEAC CD-R50S, TEAC CD-R55S and the Panasonic CW-7502. Some drives do not allow to overburn as much as you might like and limit the size of a CD to e.g. 76 minutes — this problem may be circumvented by writing the CD in RAW mode because this way the drive has no chance to find the size before starting to burn. There is no guarantee that your drive supports overburning at all. Make a test to check if your drive implements the feature. Do not just send it and hope. 🙏
  • -ignsize — Ignore the known size of the medium. This option should be used with extreme care — it exists only for debugging purposes, don't use it for other reasons. It is not needed to write disks with more than the nominal capacity. This option implies -overburn. Like, you've been warned, okay?
  • -useinfo — Use *.inf files to overwrite audio options. If this option is used, the pregap size information is read from the *.inf file that is associated with the file that contains the audio data for a track.

If used together with the -audio option, wodim may be used to write audio CDs from a pipe from icedax if you call wodim with the *.inf files as track parameter list instead of using audio files. The audio data is read from stdin in this case. See EXAMPLES section below. wodim first verifies that stdin is not connected to a terminal and runs some heuristic consistency checks on the *.inf files and then sets the track lengths from the information in the *.inf files.

If you like to write from stdin, make sure that wodim is called with a large enough FIFO size, reduce the write speed to a value below the read speed of the source drive and switch the burn-free option for the recording drive on. ✨

  • defpregap=# — Set the default pre-gap size for all tracks except track number 1. This option currently only makes sense with the TEAC drive when creating track-at-once disks without the 2 second silence before each track. This option may go away in future. Don't get too attached 🥲
  • -packet — Set Packet writing mode. This is an experimental interface.
  • pktsize=# — Set the packet size to #, forces fixed packet mode. This is an experimental interface.
  • -noclose — Do not close the current track, useful only when in packet writing mode. This is an experimental interface.
  • mcn=med_cat_nr — Set the Media Catalog Number of the CD to med_cat_nr.
  • -text — Write CD-Text information based on information taken from a file that contains ascii information for the text strings. wodim supports CD-Text information based on the content of the *.inf files created by icedax and CD-Text information based on the content from a CUE sheet file. If a CUE sheet file contains both (binary CDTEXTFILE and text based SONGWRITER) entries, then the information based on the CDTEXTFILE entry will win. 🏆

You need to use the -useinfo option in addition in order to tell wodim to read the *.inf files, or cuefile=filename in order to tell wodim to read a CUE sheet file in addition. If you like to write your own CD-Text information, edit the *.inf files or the CUE sheet file with a text editor and change the fields that are relevant for CD-Text. Customize your era, bestie 💖

  • textfile=filename — Write CD-Text based on information found in the binary file filename. This file must contain information in a data format defined in the SCSI-3 MMC-2 standard and in the Red Book. The four byte size header that is defined in the SCSI standard is optional and allows to make the recognition of correct data less ambiguous. This is the best option to be used to copy CD-Text data from existing CDs that already carry CD-Text information. To get data in a format suitable for this option use wodim -vv -toc to extract the information from disk. If both, textfile=filename and CD-Text information from *.inf or *.cue files are present, textfile=filename will overwrite the other information. Winner takes all ✨
  • cuefile=filename — Take all recording related information from a CDRWIN compliant CUE sheet file. No track files are allowed when this option is present and the option -dao is currently needed in addition.

🌸 TRACK OPTIONS 🌸

Track options may be mixed with track file names. Mix and match, she's flexible like that 💅

  • isrc=ISRC_number — Set the International Standard Recording Number for the next track to ISRC_number.
  • index=list — Sets an index list for the next track. The index list is a comma separated list of numbers that are counting from index 1. The first entry in this list must contain a 0, the following numbers must be an ascending list of numbers (counting in 1/75 seconds) that represent the start of the indices. An index list in the form: 0,7500,15000 sets index 1 to the start of the track, index 2 100 seconds from the start of the track and index 3 200 seconds from the start of the track. Math but make it ✨aesthetic✨
  • -audio — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in CD-DA (similar to Red Book) audio format. The file with data for this tracks should contain stereo, 16-bit digital audio with 44100 samples/s. The byte order should be the following: MSB left, LSB left, MSB right, LSB right, MSB left and so on. The track should be a multiple of 2352 bytes. It is not possible to put the master image of an audio track on a raw disk because data will be read in multiple of 2352 bytes during the recording process.

If a filename ends in .au or .wav the file is considered to be a structured audio data file. wodim assumes that the file in this case is a Sun audio file or a Microsoft .WAV file and extracts the audio data from the files by skipping over the non-audio header information. In all other cases, wodim will only work correctly if the audio data stream does not have any header. Because many structured audio files do not have an integral number of blocks (1/75th second) in length, it is often necessary to specify the -pad option as well. wodim recognizes that audio data in a .WAV file is stored in Intel (little-endian) byte order, and will automatically byte-swap the data if the CD recorder requires big-endian data. wodim will reject any audio file that does not match the Red Book requirements of 16-bit stereo samples in PCM coding at 44100 samples/second. 🚫🎵

Using other structured audio data formats as input to wodim will usually work if the structure of the data is the structure described above (raw pcm data in big-endian byte order). However, if the data format includes a header, you will hear a click at the start of a track. Not cute. 🙈

If neither -data nor -audio have been specified, wodim defaults to -audio for all filenames that end in .au or .wav and to -data for all other files. She'll figure it out herself, lowkey mind-reading.

  • -swab — If this flag is present, audio data is assumed to be in byte-swapped (little-endian) order. Some types of CD-Writers e.g. Yamaha, Sony and the new SCSI-3/mmc drives require audio data to be presented in little-endian order, while other writers require audio data to be presented in the big-endian (network) byte order normally used by the SCSI protocol. wodim knows if a CD-Recorder needs audio data in big- or little-endian order, and corrects the byte order of the data stream to match the needs of the recorder. You only need the -swab flag if your data stream is in Intel (little-endian) byte order. She's got the byte-swapping handled, you just gotta tell her when 🔄✨

Note that the verbose output of wodim will show you if swapping is necessary to make the byte order of the input data fit the required byte order of the recorder. But bestie, lowkey important: wodim will not show you if the -swab flag was actually present for a track. So don't @ me when you can't tell. 🙈

  • -data — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in CD-ROM mode 1 (Yellow Book) format. The data size is a multiple of 2048 bytes. The file with track data should contain an ISO-9660 or Rock Ridge filesystem image (peep genisoimage for more deets). If the track data is an ufs filesystem image, fragment size should be set to 2 KB or more to allow CD-drives with 2 KB sector size to be used for reading.

-data is the default, if no other flag is present and the file does not appear to be of one of the well known audio file types.

If neither -data nor -audio have been specified, wodim defaults to -audio for all filenames that end in .au or .wav and to -data for all other files.

  • -mode2 — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in CD-ROM mode 2 format. The data size is a multiple of 2336 bytes. ✨
  • -xa — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in CD-ROM XA mode 2 form 1 format. The data size is a multiple of 2048 bytes. The XA sector sub headers will be created by the drive. With this option, the write mode is the same as with the -multi option.
  • -xa1 — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in CD-ROM XA mode 2 form 1 format. The data size is a multiple of 2056 bytes. The XA sector sub headers are part of the user data and have to be supplied by the application that prepares the data to be written. 👑
  • -xa2 — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in CD-ROM XA mode 2 form 2 format. The data is a multiple of 2324 bytes. The XA sector sub headers will be created by the drive.
  • -xamix — If this flag is present, all subsequent tracks are written in a way that allows a mix of CD-ROM XA mode 2 form 1/2 format. The data size is a multiple of 2332 bytes. The XA sector sub headers are part of the user data and have to be supplied by the application that prepares the data to be written. The CRC and the P/Q parity ECC/EDC information (depending on the sector type) have to be supplied by the application that prepares the data to be written. So yeah, that's a lot of homework for whoever's prepping the data. 🫶
  • -cdi — If this flag is present, the TOC type for the disk is set to CDI. This only makes sense with XA disks.
  • -isosize — Use the ISO-9660 file system size as the size of the next track. This option is needed if you want wodim to directly read the image of a track from a raw disk partition or from a TAO master CD. In the first case the option -isosize is needed to limit the size of the CD to the size of the ISO filesystem. In the second case the option -isosize is needed to prevent wodim from reading the two run out blocks that are appended by each CD-recorder in track at once mode. These two run out blocks cannot be read and would cause a buffer underrun that would cause a defective copy. 😭
Do not use this option on files created by genisoimage and in case wodim reads the track data from stdin. In the first case, you would prevent wodim from writing the amount of padding that has been appended by genisoimage and in the latter case, it will not work because stdin is not seekable. Like, it literally cannot work. 💀

If -isosize is used for a track, wodim will automatically add padding for this track as if the -pad option has been used but the amount of padding may be less than the padding written by genisoimage. Note that if you use -isosize on a track that contains Sparc boot information, the boot information will be lost.

Note also that this option cannot be used to determine the size of a file system if the multi session option is present.

  • -pad — If the track is a data track, 15 sectors of zeroed data will be added to the end of this and each subsequent data track. In this case, the -pad option is superseded by the padsize= option. It will remain however as a shorthand for padsize=15s. If the -pad option refers to an audio track, wodim will pad the audio data to be a multiple of 2352 bytes. The audio data padding is done with binary zeroes which is equal to absolute silence. 🤫

-pad remains valid until disabled by -nopad.

  • padsize=# — Set the amount of data to be appended as padding to the next track to #. Opposed to the behavior of the -pad option, the value for padsize= is reset to zero for each new track. wodim assumes a sector size of 2048 bytes for the padsize= option, independent from the real sector size and independent from the write mode. The megabytes mentioned in the verbose mode output however are counting the output sector size which is e.g. 2448 bytes when writing in RAW/RAW96 mode. See fs= option for possible arguments. To pad the equivalent of 20 minutes on a CD, you may write padsize=20x60x75s. Use this option if your CD-drive is not able to read the last sectors of a track or if you want to be able to read the CD on a Linux system with the ISO-9660 filesystem read ahead bug. If an empty file is used for track data, this option may be used to create a disk that is entirely made of padding. This may e.g. be used to find out how much overburning is possible with a specific media. 🔥
  • -nopad — Do not pad the following tracks — the default.
  • -shorttrack — Allow all subsequent tracks to violate the Red Book track length standard which requires a minimum track length of 4 seconds. This option is only useful when used in SAO or RAW mode. Not all drives support this feature. The drive must accept the resulting CUE sheet or support RAW writing. Breaking the rules fr fr. 💅
  • -noshorttrack — Re-enforce the Red Book track length standard. Tracks must be at least 4 seconds. (Back to being a good citizen, bestie.)
  • pregap=# — Set the pre-gap size for the next track. This option currently only makes sense with the TEAC drive when creating track-at-once disks without the 2 second silence before each track. This option may go away in future. So like… don't get too attached. 🙈
  • -preemp — If this flag is present, all TOC entries for subsequent audio tracks will indicate that the audio data has been sampled with 50/15 microsec pre-emphasis. The data, however is not modified during the process of transferring from file to disk. This option has no effect on data tracks.
  • -nopreemp — If this flag is present, all TOC entries for subsequent audio tracks will indicate that the audio data has been mastered with linear data — this is the default.
  • -copy — If this flag is present, all TOC entries for subsequent audio tracks of the resulting CD will indicate that the audio data has permission to be copied without limit. This option has no effect on data tracks.
  • -nocopy — If this flag is present, all TOC entries for subsequent audio tracks of the resulting CD will indicate that the audio data has permission to be copied only once for personal use — this is the default.
  • -scms — If this flag is present, all TOC entries for subsequent audio tracks of the resulting CD will indicate that the audio data has no permission to be copied anymore. Locked down, no cap. 🔒
  • tsize=# — If the master image for the next track has been stored on a raw disk, use this option to specify the valid amount of data on this disk. If the image of the next track is stored in a regular file, the size of that file is taken to determine the length of this track. If the track contains an ISO 9660 filesystem image use the -isosize option to determine the length of that filesystem image.

In Disk at Once mode and with some drives that use the TEAC programming interface, even in Track at Once mode, wodim needs to know the size of each track before starting to write the disk. wodim now checks this and aborts before starting to write. If this happens you will need to run genisoimage -print-size before and use the output (with s appended) as an argument to the tsize= option of wodim (e.g. tsize=250000s).

See fs= option for possible arguments.

✨ EXAMPLES ✨

Okay bestie, this is the part where it all comes together 🫶 For every single example down below, just assume the CD/DVD-Recorder is hooked up to the primary SCSI bus of the machine, and the SCSI target id is set to 2. That's the vibe. That's the setup.

🌸 Burning a plain CD-ROM

To record a pure CD-ROM at double speed, using data from the file cdimage.raw:

wodim -v speed=2 dev=2,0 cdimage.raw

🎀 Making the ISO 9660 image in the first place

To create an image for a ISO 9660 filesystem with Rock Ridge extensions:

genisoimage -R -o cdimage.raw /home/joerg/master/tree

🦋 Peeking at the result before you commit

To check the resulting file before writing to CD on Solaris:

mount -r -F fbk -o type=hsfs /dev/fbk0:cdimage.raw /mnt

On Linux:

mount cdimage.raw -r -t iso9660 -o loop /mnt

Go on with:

ls -lR /mnt
umount /mnt

💅 The pipeline era (no disk image, we're brave)

If the overall speed of the system is sufficient and the structure of the filesystem is not too complex, wodim will run without creating an image of the ISO 9660 filesystem. Simply run the pipeline:

genisoimage -R /master/tree | wodim -v fs=6m speed=2 dev=2,0 -

The recommended minimum FIFO size for running this pipeline is 4 MBytes. As the default FIFO size is 4 MB, the fs= option needs only be present if you want to use a different FIFO size. If your system is loaded, you should run genisoimage in the real time class too. To raise the priority of genisoimage replace the command

genisoimage -R /master/tree

by

priocntl -e -c RT -p 59 genisoimage -R /master/tree

on Solaris and by

nice --18 genisoimage -R /master/tree

on systems that don't have UNIX International compliant real-time scheduling.

wodim runs at priority 59 on Solaris, you should run genisoimage at no more than priority 58. On other systems, you should run genisoimage at no less than nice --18.

Creating a CD-ROM without file system image on disk has been tested on a Sparcstation-2 with a Yamaha CDR-400. It did work up to quad speed when the machine was not loaded. A faster machine may be able to handle quad speed also in the loaded case. No cap, that's just what the testing showed 💀

🌈 Audio CDs (CD-DA) at single speed

To record a pure CD-DA (audio) at single speed, with each track contained in a file named track01.cdaudio, track02.cdaudio, etc:

wodim -v speed=1 dev=/dev/cdrw -audio track*.cdaudio

💖 Dry-run check before you commit

To check if it will be ok to use double speed for the example above. Use the dummy write option:

wodim -v -dummy speed=2 dev=/dev/cdrw -audio track*.cdaudio

🍓 Mixed-mode CD, the classic combo

To record a mixed-mode CD with an ISO 9660 filesystem from cdimage.raw on the first track, the other tracks being audio tracks from the files track01.cdaudio, track02.cdaudio, etc:

wodim -v dev=2,0 cdimage.raw -audio track*.cdaudio

🧚 For drives that need the size upfront

To handle drives that need to know the size of a track before starting to write, first run

genisoimage -R -q -print-size /master/tree

and then run

genisoimage -R /master/tree | wodim speed=2 dev=2,0 tsize=XXXs -

where XXX is replaced by the output of the previous run of genisoimage.

👑 Copying an audio CD, the accurate way

To copy an audio CD in the most accurate way, first run

icedax dev=/dev/cdrom -vall cddb=0 -B -Owav

and then run

wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -dao -useinfo -text  *.wav

This will try to copy track indices and to read CD-Text information from disk. If there is no CD-Text information, icedax will try to get the information from freedb.org instead.

⭐ Copying an audio CD through a pipe (no intermediate files, iconic)

To copy an audio CD from a pipe (without intermediate files), first run

icedax dev=1,0 -vall cddb=0 -info-only

and then run

icedax dev=1,0 -no-infofile -B -Oraw - | \
wodim dev=2,0 -v -dao -audio -useinfo -text *.inf

This will get all information (including track size info) from the *.inf files and then read the audio data from stdin.

If you like to write from stdin, make sure that wodim is called with a large enough FIFO size (e.g. fs=128m), reduce the write speed to a value below the read speed of the source drive (e.g. speed=12), and get a CD/DVD drive with BURN-Free feature if it is not available yet. Bestie this one matters, fr fr 🔥

💜 Setting drive options without burning anything

To set drive options without writing a CD (e.g. to switch a drive to single session mode), run

wodim dev=1,0 -setdropts driveropts=singlesession

If you like to do this when no CD is in the drive, call

wodim dev=1,0 -force -setdropts driveropts=singlesession

🎀 Clone mode, because we love an exact copy

To copy a CD in clone mode, first read the master CD using:

readom dev=b,t,l -clone f=somefile

or (in case the CD contains many sectors that are unreadable by intention) by calling:

readom dev=1,0 -clone -nocorr f=somefile

will create the files somefile and somefile.toc. Then write the CD using:

wodim dev=1,0 -raw96r -clone -v somefile

🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

These are the little env-var besties that whisper defaults into wodim's ear before it even starts. Set them and vibe 💅

  • CDR_DEVICE — This may either hold a device identifier that is suitable to the open call of the SCSI transport library or a label in the file /etc/wodim.conf.
  • CDR_SPEED — Sets the default speed value for writing (see also speed= option).
  • CDR_FIFOSIZE — Sets the default size of the FIFO (see also fs=# option).
  • CDR_FORCERAWSPEED — If this environment variable is set, wodim will allow you to write at the full RAW encoding speed a single CPU supports. This will create high potential of buffer underruns. Use with care.
  • CDR_FORCESPEED — If this environment variable is set, wodim will allow you to write at the full DMA speed the system supports. There is no DMA reserve for reading the data that is to be written from disk. This will create high potential of buffer underruns. Use with care.
  • RSH — If the RSH environment is present, the remote connection will not be created via rcmd(3) but by calling the program pointed to by RSH. Use e.g. RSH=/usr/bin/ssh to create a secure shell connection.

Note that this forces wodim to create a pipe to the rsh(1) program and disallows wodim to directly access the network socket to the remote server. This makes it impossible to set up performance parameters and slows down the connection compared to a root initiated rcmd(3) connection.

  • RSCSI — If the RSCSI environment is present, the remote SCSI server will not be the program /opt/schily/sbin/rscsi but the program pointed to by RSCSI. Note that the remote SCSI server program name will be ignored if you log in using an account that has been created with a remote SCSI server program as login shell.

🦋 FILES 🦋

/etc/wodim.conf

Default values can be set for the following options in /etc/wodim.conf. For example: CDR_FIFOSIZE=8m or CDR_SPEED=2

  • CDR_DEVICE — This may either hold a device identifier that is suitable to the open call of the SCSI transport library or a label in the file /etc/wodim.conf that allows to identify a specific drive on the system.
  • CDR_SPEED — Sets the default speed value for writing (see also speed= option).
  • CDR_FIFOSIZE — Sets the default size of the FIFO (see also fs=# option).
  • CDR_MAXFIFOSIZE — Sets the maximum size of the FIFO (see also fs=# option).

Any other keyword (label) is an identifier (symbolic name) for a specific drive on the system. Such an identifier may not contain the characters ',', '/', '@' or ':'.

Each line that follows a label contains a whitespace separated list of items. Currently, four items are recognized: the drive's target specification, the default speed that should be used for this drive, the default FIFO size that should be used for this drive and drive specific options. The values for speed and fifosize may be set to -1 to tell wodim to use the global defaults. target can be -1 to use the auto-guessing of the drive (see above).

The value for driveropts may be omitted or set to "" if no driveropts are used. A typical line may look this way:

plex760= 0,5,0 12   50m  varirec=1

pioneer= /dev/hdd   -1   -1

This tells wodim that a drive named plex760 is at scsibus 0, target 5, lun 0 and should be used with speed 12 and a FIFO size of 50 MB. It also uses some device specific parameter. A second drive may is accessible via the device file /dev/hdd and uses the default speed and the default FIFO size.

💖 SEE ALSO 💖

icedax(1), readom(1), genisoimage(1), ssh(1).

Go read those too, they're the supporting cast and they ate 💅✨

📝 NOTES (the important tea) 📝

Okay bestie, gather round, because these notes are the difference between a cute little coaster and an actual working CD. 🫶

On Solaris you literally need to stop the volume management if you wanna use the USCSI fallback SCSI transport code. And no, not even something as innocent as wodim -scanbus will work while volume management is running. She said what she said. 💅

Disks made in Track At Once mode are not suitable as a master for direct mass production by CD manufacturers. If you want to record such disks you're gonna need the disk at once option, no way around it. That said, disks made in Track At Once will normally still be read in all CD players. However — some old audio CD players may produce a two second click between two audio tracks. Iconic? No. Real? Yes. 😭

The minimal size of a track is 4 seconds or 300 sectors. If you write smaller tracks, the CD-Recorder will add dummy blocks. This is not an error, even though the SCSI-error message absolutely looks like one. The audacity of that error message, honestly. 💀

The Yamaha CDR-400 and all new SCSI-3/mmc conforming drives are supported in single and multi-session. Slay.

You should run several tests in all supported speeds of your drive with the -dummy option turned on if you're using wodim on an unknown system. Writing a CD is a real-time process, bestie. NFS, CIFS and other network file systems won't always deliver constantly the needed data rates. If you wanna use wodim with CD-images that live on a NFS mounted filesystem, be sure the FIFO size is big enough. And if you want to make sure that buffer underruns are not caused by your source disk, you may use the command

wodim -dummy dev=2,0 padsize=600m /dev/null

to create a disk that is entirely made of dummy data. Fake it till you make it energy. ✨

There are also cases where you either need to be root or install the wodim executable with suid-root permissions. Let's break it down:

  1. First, if you're using a device manufactured before 1999 which requires a non-MMC driver, you should run wodim in dummy mode before writing data. If you find a problem doing this, please report it to the cdrkit maintainers (see below).
  2. Second, certain functionality may be unusable because of Linux's SCSI command filtering. When using wodim for anything except pure data writing, you should also test the process in dummy mode and report trouble to the contact address below.

If you still want to run wodim with root permissions, you can set the permissions of the executable to suid-root. See the additional notes of your system/program distribution or README.suidroot, which is part of the cdrkit source. 🌸

You should not connect old drives that do not support disconnect/reconnect to either the SCSI bus that is connected to the CD-Recorder or the source disk. Just don't. 🙈

A Compact Disc can have no more than 99 tracks. Periodt.

When creating a disc with both audio and data tracks, the data should be on track 1 — otherwise you should create a CDplus disk, which is a multi session disk with the first session containing the audio tracks and the following session containing the data track. Main character sequencing. 👑

Many operating systems are not able to read more than a single data track, or need special software to do so. So yeah, keep that in mind.

If you have more information or SCSI command manuals for currently unsupported CD/DVD/BR/HD-DVD-Recorders, please contact the cdrkit maintainers (see below). They would love that.

Many CD recorders have bugs and often require a firmware update to work correctly. If you experience problems which cannot be solved or explained by the notes above, please look for instructions on the homepage of the particular manufacturer. Not us, them. 🧚

Some bugs will force you to power cycle the device or to reboot the machine. Yeah. That kind of day.

The FIFO percent output is computed just after a block of data has been written to the CD/DVD-Recorder. For this reason, there will never be a 100% FIFO fill ratio while the FIFO is in streaming mode. She's always gonna be a little bit less than perfect. Relatable. 💜

🚨 DIAGNOSTICS 🚨

You have 4 seconds to abort wodim start after you see the message:

Starting to write CD at speed %d in %s mode for %s session.

In most shells you can do that by pressing Ctrl-C. Quick, bestie, go go go! 😭

A typical error message for a SCSI command looks like:

wodim: I/O error. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: no error
CDB:  00 20 00 00 00 00
status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
Sense Bytes: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0A 00 00 00 00 25 00 00 00 00 00
Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0
Sense Code: 0x25 Qual 0x00 (logical unit not supported) Fru 0x0
Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid)
cmd finished after 0.002s timeout 40s

Let's decode this whole mood, line by line:

  • The first line gives information about the transport of the command. The text after the first colon gives the error text for the system call from the view of the kernel. It usually is I/O error unless other problems happen. The next words contain a short description for the SCSI command that fails. The rest of the line tells you if there were any problems for the transport of the command over the SCSI bus. fatal error means that it was not possible to transport the command (i.e. no device present at the requested SCSI address).
  • The second line prints the SCSI command descriptor block for the failed command.
  • The third line gives information on the SCSI status code returned by the command, if the transport of the command succeeds. This is error information from the SCSI device.
  • The fourth line is a hex dump of the auto request sense information for the command.
  • The fifth line is the error text for the sense key if available, followed by the segment number that is only valid if the command was a copy command. If the error message is not directly related to the current command, the text deferred error is appended.
  • The sixth line is the error text for the sense code and the sense qualifier if available. If the type of the device is known, the sense data is decoded from tables in scsierrs.c. The text is followed by the error value for a field replaceable unit.
  • The seventh line prints the block number that is related to the failed command and text for several error flags. The block number may not be valid.
  • The eighth line reports the timeout set up for this command and the time that the command really needed to complete.

Now, plot twist: the following message is not an error:

Track 01: Total bytes read/written: 2048/2048 (1 sectors).
wodim: I/O error. flush cache: scsi sendcmd: no error
CDB:  35 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
status: 0x2 (CHECK CONDITION)
Sense Bytes: F0 00 05 80 00 00 27 0A 00 00 00 00 B5 00 00 00 00 00
Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0
Sense Code: 0xB5 Qual 0x00 (dummy data blocks added) Fru 0x0
Sense flags: Blk -2147483609 (valid)
cmd finished after 0.002s timeout 40s

It simply notifies that a track that is smaller than the minimum size has been expanded to 300 sectors. She's not mad, she's just informing you. 💅

💀 BUGS 💀

Let's keep it real, no cap:

  • netscsid does not work properly and is generally unmaintained. It is probably not compatible with rscsi from cdrtools either. Good bugfixes are welcome — talk to Cdrkit maintainers. 🫶
  • cuefile support is very limited, only one file is allowed. For volunteers, see the TODO file in the source.
  • Specifying an audio file multiple times causes corruption of the second track (effectively no data plus minimum padding). Yeah, that one hurts. 😭
  • Some of the bugs may be fixed in Joerg Schilling's cdrtools. See there for details, URL attached below.

🎀 CREDITS 🎀

The way these people carried this project... icons, all of them:

  • Joerg Schilling (schilling@fokus.fhg.de) — For writing cdrecord and libscg which represent the most parts of wodim's code.
  • Bill Swartz (Bill_Swartz@twolf.com) — For helping me with the TEAC driver support
  • Aaron Newsome (aaron.d.newsome@wdc.com) — For letting me develop Sony support on his drive
  • Eric Youngdale (eric@andante.jic.com) — For supplying mkisofs
  • Gadi Oxman (gadio@netvision.net.il) — For tips on the ATAPI standard
  • Finn Arne Gangstad (finnag@guardian.no) — For the first FIFO implementation.
  • Dave Platt (dplatt@feghoot.ml.org) — For creating the experimental packet writing support, the first implementation of CD-RW blanking support, the first .wav file decoder and many nice discussions on cdrecord.
  • Chris P. Ross (cross@eng.us.uu.net) — For the first implementation of a BSDI SCSI transport.
  • Grant R. Guenther (grant@torque.net) — For creating the first parallel port transport implementation for Linux.
  • Kenneth D. Merry (ken@kdm.org) — for providing the CAM port for FreeBSD together with Michael Smith (msmith@freebsd.org)
  • Heiko Eiszfeldt (heiko@hexco.de) — for making libedc_ecc available (needed to write RAW data sectors).

📬 MAILING LISTS 📬

If you want to actively take part on the development of wodim, you may join the developer mailing list via this URL:

https://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=31006

The mail address of the list is: debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

Come hang out, bestie, the group chat is open. 💖

👑 AUTHORS 👑

wodim is currently maintained as part of the cdrkit project by its developers. Most of the code and this manual page was originally written by:

Joerg Schilling
Seestr. 110
D-13353 Berlin
Germany

This application is derived from "cdrecord" as included in the cdrtools package [1] created by Joerg Schilling, who deserves most of the credit for its success. However, he is not involved into the development of this spinoff and therefore he shall not be held responsible for any problems caused by it.

Do not refer to this application as "cdrecord", do not try to get support for wodim by contacting the original authors.

Additional information can be found on:

https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debburn/

If you have support questions, send them to

debburn-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

If you have definitely found a bug, send a mail to this list or to

submit@bugs.debian.org

writing at least a short description into the Subject and "Package: cdrkit" in the first line of the mail body. Don't be shy, don't be vague, give them the details. ✨

🌈 SOURCES 🌈

and that's a wrap on the whole page, bestie!! 🎉 Version 2.0 of wodim(1) — you read the entire thing and honestly? main character behavior. Go burn something beautiful. 💅💖🔥

📦 where this page comes from