All the CD-ROM drive vendors that participated in this report say that their drives can read multisession CDs; however, when we tried to read a multisession CD, none of the drives succeeded.
The process of recording data and an associated table of contents is called a session. Whether it's a commercial CD-ROM title or your company's data that you've recorded onto CD-ROM, information is placed sequentially on the CD in spiral tracks. At the end of the recording process, a table of contents, listing the files and directory locations, is added to the CD.
To read multisessions, drives need some read electronics and a device driver that can identify more than one table of contents on the CD. Our problems centered around not having the latter component. Although each drive was capable of multisession reads,
none was shipped with the proper driver.
JVC Information Products recently released a driver that can read OrangeBook multisessions on the CD. The price is $200 for a 10-driver distribution pack; the company includes the drivers with its CD-recorder products. When we loaded this driver, the CD-ROM drives worked as advertised. In addition, Adaptec's EZ-SCSI adapter comes with a device driver to read Photo CD multisession CDs.
Multisession Questions
