Driver for CD 300e?

[Scott Baret]

I've got three Classics and now have three CD 300e drives for them. The Classics are running 7.0.

I need a driver for them that is freeware/public domain, works on System 7.0, and includes audio CD playback. Any suggestions?

Out of curiosity, what version of the Apple CD driver did they ship with?

I do have one of these 300es running on my Plus with System 6. I'm using CD-ROM toolkit on that one but I only have a single user license for it so I'd need something else for the Classics.

 

[tomlee59]

You might try the ones at http://www.macdrivermuseum.net/disk.shtml

However, the primitive audio subsystem in the Classic may not successfully convert 16-bit stereo into 8-bit mono at speed, so if getting the Classic to play audio is your goal, you may be disappointed. But using the Classic only to control playback of audio tracks, and getting said audio directly from the CDROM drive is eminently practical (I use one of my Pluses for precisely this task, making the combination the world's most ungainly CD player).

 

[LCGuy]

I find that the best version to use on the Panasonic drives is either 5.3.2 or 5.4. On my 7.1 systems (I don't run 7.0, or anything below 7.1), I generally use a copy of the CD-ROM software lifted from a 7.6 system, which IIRC is 5.4.

However, none of this will allow you to play audio CDs over the internal speaker. In fact, no version of the Mac OS supported digital audio playback until OS 9, and i seriously doubt that the OS 9 Apple CD/DVD driver would work on anything below OS 9, let alone a Classic running 7.0.

Besides...why would you even want to listen to audio CDs on the internal speaker? You can get a cheap set of crappy external speakers for...well, nothing these days, and even that would sound miles better than the single speaker in the Classic, believe me. About 8 years ago I used to have a few audio CD tracks in AIFF format that I used to play on my Classic II from a Zip 250 disc, and it sounded absolutely horrible.