The most important parts of the package are cdrecord, a console-based burning program; cdda2wav, a CD audio ripper that uses libparanoia; and mkisofs, a CD/DVD/BD/UDF/HFS filesystem image creator.

DVD writing support (cdrecord-ProDVD) in cdrecord started in early 1998, at the request of the data archivists of the European Southern Observatory.

[citation needed] In 2002, Jörg Schilling started offering free license keys to the closed-source variant cdrecord-ProDVD for educational, and research use, shortly thereafter also for private use.

[20] The lack of open-source DVD writing support in 2001 led to heated discussions on the mailing lists,[17] and to a number of unofficial patches for supporting the Pioneer DVD-R A03, the first DVD writer to reach mass market, and forks of cdrecord: Mandrake shipped a version called cdrecord-dvdhack,[21] whereas Redhat had dvdrecord.

Schilling, however, rejected this approach as well as other modifications used by Linux distributions, with the rationale that it would make the software more complex and less portable as this function was not available on other UNIX systems.

The following are one-sentence summaries of the different positions: As a result of this controversy: Cdrtools are part of Jörg Schilling's toolset Schily-Tools which was originally distributed on SourceForge.

It includes the programs: cdrecord, cdda2wav, readcd, mkisofs, smake, bsh, btcflash, calc, calltree, change, compare, count, devdump, dmake based on SunPro Make, hdump, isodebug, isodump, isoinfo, isovfy, label, mt, obosh, od, p, POSIX patch, pbosh, sccs, scgcheck, scpio, sdd, sfind, sformat, smake, sh/bosh (Bourne sh), star, star_sym, strar, suntar, gnutar, tartest, termcap, and ved.