There are only a few manufacturers of CD-ROM and CD-R(W) drives - far fewer than there are brands on the market. Many of even the biggest names, such as Hewlett-Packard, do not make drives at all. Rather, they contract with manufacturers to deliver drives branded with their names. We speak of the process as "rebadging". In the process, they may have specific features built in for their purposes or they may use off-the-shelf product with a new faceplate.
The information needed to write a disc depends on the features you want to use. A program with limited application, such as one which writes only audio or which only copies a CD or CD-ROM, is not sensitive to many of those features. One which needs to create CD-Text and to write data from a HD in DAO and to create a VCD and to do all the other things a full-function program sets out to accomplish must know the specific properties of the hardware it is to use. Therefore it needs the specific drive string and that means that a rebadged Plextor is not a Plextor, but an HP, IOmega or whatever.
Further complicating the matter is that the rebadgers may have different drives under the same "hood" at the same or different times. One may be bought from Plextor, another from Ricoh and so on. They are different drives to the mastering program, but the user has no way to know that. Neither, in fact, does the software publisher until the drive or at least the essential information comes to them. If the manufacturer cooperates, the information may be there before the drive hits the market; if not, they have to find a way to get that particular drive (in the sense of "under the hood") from commercial sources. There is no way that a programmer can support a drive he does not know. Some programs with less capability can get away with less - whether the mechanism came from Plextor or Ricoh may make no difference for the limited application. So when a publisher says that Drive X is supported by Version N, they mean that the drive version(s) they know are supported. They do not mean that the one you buy this week is supported unless its the same mechanism that bore that name last week.
Incidentally, you will see evidence of this problem even with limited-function software. In the newsgroups, you will find arguments over whether the FlyByNight model 12 supports a feature. One person says it doesn't; another says it does. Of course, they're likely to be right. Both of them. They have different drives with no external indication of the difference.
Before you ask: the same holds true with blank media. The package of RitesAll 16x media you buy at your neighborhood feed store today may have the same discs inside as the next one on the shelf or the package you buy tomorrow - or it may not. The only external indication you have may be the country of origin, usually on a sticker attached to the outside. That alone is a good indicator: this discs are from Taiwan, those are from Malaysia - they're not likely to be the same formulation. You cannot judge by the appearance of the blank except in a negative sense. That is, if they look different in color or surface finish, they will almost certainly perform differently, but if they look the same, they may or may not be equivalent.
Now, a CD-R(W) reports itself to the operating system as a "drive string" - a set of characters which identifies it so that its features can be known and exploited. Two drives which look the same to the user but are different inside will report different drive strings. So the unsupported unit which shares a model number with a supported one differs where the computer sees it - in the drive string. The computer cannot see the writing on the box or even on the drive itself; it knows the drive by its string and supports it or not based on what's in that string.
Similarly, the recorder recognizes the blank not by what the packager wrote onto the disc or its package but by what is written into the disc itself in the ATIP. For further discussion of that, please see the page A Blank is not Blank. In this case, the ATIP limits what can be done with the blank, but two different formulations may have identical information in their ATIPs.
E-mail me at cdrecording@mrichter.com
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