Set CD-ROM Speed

Set-cd-rom-speed is an application for setting CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drive speed, written in Kommander.

Since the issues mentioned here apply to CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives as well as to recorders for these types of media, in this document the name 'CD-ROM drive' will be used to refer to all of these drive types.

Fast CD-ROM drives have one big disadvantage over older and slower models. In order to be able to support high data transfer speeds, the CD-ROM disk must spin very quickly in the disk drive, which results in a lot of noise. This loud humming can make listening to MP3 or OGG music from CD-ROMs a very unpleasant experience and is very annoying at best for other tasks which don't require the CD-ROM to work at full speed.

Using set-cd-rom-speed, you can decrease the drive's speed and thus reduce the annoying noise. The GUI allows choosing three predefined speeds suitable for different tasks and custom speeds provided by the user. The list of available CD-ROM drives is generated based on information from /etc/fstab. This works even if you use supermount-ng or subfs for mounting the CD-ROMs. The program supports multiple languages and several translations are available. It also integrates with KDE by adding an item which allows setting drive speed to the context menu of CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drive icons displayed on the desktop.

2006-10-04 (version 1.1.6)
* added Czech translation (thanks to Jozef Riha)
* fixes in Slovak translation (thanks to Jozef Riha)
* two variants of Brazilian Portuguese translation merged into one (thanks to Dherik Barison)

2006-09-24 (version 1.1.5)
* added Brazilian Portuguese translation (two variants; see README) (thanks to Paulo Zambon and Dherik Barison)
* added Slovak translation (thanks to Ctibor Strmensky)

2005-06-19 (version 1.1.4)
* added Russian translation (thanks to Alexey Kouznetsov)
* added Italian translation (thanks to Andrea Santilli [Enso])

2004-12-19 (version 1.1.3)
* added Spanish translation (thanks to Eduardo Robles Elvira [Edulix])
* added missing copyright statement in source code comments

2004-12-08 (version 1.1.2)
* improved heuristic for finding CD and DVD drives
* display 'CD or DVD Drive' instead of an empty string if human-readable device name can't be determined
* install.sh now displays a warning if Kommander isn't installed
* bugfix: don't get confused when awk!=gawk

2004-11-30 (version 1.1.1)
* added French translation (thanks to Patrice Tremblay [PaT])

2004-11-29 (version 1.1.0)
* entries for setting drive speed are now added to devices' context menus (see README for details)
* minor fixes in i18n

2004-11-23 (version 1.0.4)
* added German translation (thanks to Holger Diehm)
* correctly recognize devices located in subdirectories of /dev
* recognize devices whose basename is 'cd'

2004-11-23 (version 1.0.3)
* descriptive device names are now shown in addition to file names in /dev

2004-11-23 (version 1.0.2)
* added Hungarian translation (thanks to Charles Barcza)
* improved dialog box layout behavior for window resizing

2004-11-22 (version 1.0.1)
* fixed install script so it can use either ginstall or install
* correctly recognize drives whose device names start with 'dvd' and 'cdrecord'

2004-11-21 (version 1.0)
* initial release