Linux Multimedia Hints

How to burn mp3 songs to audio CDs?

Install the xmms-diskwriter rpm and when you start xmms, choose it under 'Options | Preferences | Output plugin. Use 'Congfigure' to enter a directory to write the .wav's to. (Don't forget to switch back to a sound plugin when you're done.) Then when you run xmms, turn off 'shuffle' and 'repeat' under Preferences, load the directory where the mp3's are and select all, or just the ones you want, and hit , or click the play button. xmms will then convert them to .wav's and put 'em where you told it to. FWIW, I always send the .wav's to /wav in my home dir. I'd also suggest you equalize the 'wav's with normalize. ( normalize-0.7.3-1mdk ) Then in the dir where the 'wav's are 'normalize -m *' will process all the .wav's and equalize the volume levels. Then I load the /wav directory and burn them all to a CD using Gcombust.

I'd also strongly recommend you upgrade 'cdrecord' and 'mkisofs' which are the two binaries that all the above GUI's use to burn to CD. Keep in mind too that CD burning is still more of an art than a science. Your final results are gonna be very dependent on the quality of your hardware and the media (CD-r's) you use.

ATIP info from disk:
  Indicated writing power: 4
  Is not unrestricted
  Is not erasable
  Disk sub type: Medium Type A, low Beta category (A-) (2)
  ATIP start of lead in:  -12508 (97:15/17)
  ATIP start of lead out: 359848 (79:59/73)
Disk type:    Short strategy type (Phthalocyanine or similar)
Manuf. index: 22
Manufacturer: Ritek Co.
                       

Now to do a add a session to that cd you need to get the
start and end sector of the previous session on the cd like this:

$ cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -msinfo

this will return something like 0,51635
this gives the start and end point of the previous session.

first create the iso image to append to cd like this:

$ mkisofs -o image2.iso -R -J -C 0,51635 -M 0,0,0 

with the -C switch you enter the numbers return by the -msinfo option of
cdrecord
the -M switch tells mkisofs to merge this image with the image found on dev
0,0,0

and then you ready to burn that image to the cd like this:

$ cdrecord -v dev=0,0,0 speed=4 -data -multi image2.iso