I am writing an app that needs to be able to burn its own CD's, and I am stumped as to how to do it. First I tried the ICDBurn interface, but that only pops up the standard Windows burn dialog, which I want to avoid. Then I tried IMAPI, which has two annoying problems. First, it cannot finalize a CD, so others can still add things to the CD even if it is CD-R. Second, the filenames must be less than 31 characters, which is no good. So that rules IMAPI out. I looked at a few other things, such as the Nero SDK, but that requires that Nero be installed on the user's computer. Other items cost money, which I cannot pay for. A search of SourceForge turned up plenty of results, except that they were all for Linux and used some of Linux's built-in commands. I came up with the term ASPI, which I assume is the lower level API for working with burning hardware, but a search of MSDN came up empty. Does anyone know how the big programs do it? How do you transfer the files directly to the CD? How do you finalize the CD? Does anyone know anything about ASPI, and whether it would help me at all?

ASPI is a simple programming layer on the top of SCSI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface, created by adaptec). It enables you to send commands to SCSI devices (and to any device which supports the SCSI minidriver model; this includes all the IDE and SATA devices).

If you want to learn more about ASPI, check this (pdf)

Big programs do it by developping it from scratch. When I had to create a CD burning software some years ago, I searched an API to do it, and the less expensive was goldenhawk's API. It is still expensive (1400$ for the lite version, and you can't create a product that would compete with their own CD burning software (cdrwin) with this lite license) but the price was OK for the company that hired me at this time.

Regards,