Um.....

Story: Creating audio CD compilations on LinuxTotal Replies: 26
Author Content
SFN

Jan 11, 2007
12:05 PM EDT
Step 1 Create a playlist from the songs wish to use in your favorite media player. I use XMMS

Step 2 Choose the output plugin that writes to WAV. In XMMS it's the Disk Writer plugin and it comes standard with XMMS. When you choose it, make sure you pick the directory you want to write the WAV files to.

Step 3 Use your favorite CD burning app to create a CD from the WAV files. I use Gnomebaker. Make sure you choose the Disc At Once (DAO) option so you don't have the annoying 2 second gap between songs.

Done.

Or am I just being obtuse.

Or perhaps, the opposite of obtuse.
DarrenR114

Jan 11, 2007
12:20 PM EDT
Quoting: Or am I just being obtuse.

Or perhaps, the opposite of obtuse.


I don't know you well enough to say that you're a-cute.
Sander_Marechal

Jan 11, 2007
1:00 PM EDT
Even better:

1) insert blank CD

2) click "create audio CD" in the popup that appears

3) drag&drop some mp3's or ogg's

4) click burn

:-)
rijelkentaurus

Jan 11, 2007
1:06 PM EDT
Oy. Yeah, this is great is your GUI died, or if you're RMS and you don't generally use a GUI. People read these articles and think, "Oh, those crazy Linux users!"
cr

Jan 11, 2007
1:18 PM EDT
Seen and saved.

Stuff like this is good for when I'm shelled into the machine which has the burner, or pulling together a script to run on it. While I enjoy Perl/Tk, scripts aren't simple to code or run when they're sticky with GUI.
bigg

Jan 11, 2007
1:39 PM EDT
I wonder if this article was funded by Microsoft.
SFN

Jan 12, 2007
5:00 AM EDT
Quoting:People read these articles and think, "Oh, those crazy Linux users!"
That's was my big issue with this too. Do we really need articles that make the average user think they need programming skills to perform mundane tasks in Linux?
cr

Jan 12, 2007
7:20 AM EDT
SVN, I suggest you write up your own procedure posted above, with screenshots, and send it in to LXer and howtoforge; use Falko Timme's excellent examples on howtoforge.net as models. If you're running more than one distro, or can live-CD a couple, investigate ways to do it in the tools provided with that distro; screenshot those too and add those to the article you write.

Sander, do all current distros pop up a 'create audio CD' applet when an unburned CDR is inserted? Probably not; none of mine do. What distro are you running, where this is the default response to sensing an unburned disk? How hard is that tooling to get working in other distros? How hard is it to set it up to have that kind of response to the CDR drive?

Perhaps the how-to article you're reacting to should be retitled to "Creating audio CD compilations on Linux at the commandline", thus limiting its declared scope. Within that scope, it is valid.

So is your approach, given the toolset you have ready to hand. You obviously come at Linux from a different angle than I do. You apparently prefer to work primarily or exclusively with GUI tools and avoid the commandline. So do I, when the task at hand is better accomplished with an existing installed GUI tool, and/or the mechanics of the task are not of present interest to me.

More often than not, though, I find myself popping open an Xterm and diving in (with tools like iptraf, ytree, mc and jstar) in order to see exactly what's going on and tweak it to do exactly what I want instead. That's the kind of computer user I am -- I currently have eight KDE desktops up, a couple dozen apps on the taskbar, and over half of them are in Xterms which stay open for days and weeks. When I was on CP/M, I disassembled things, cleaned them up and reassembled them for my use; on DOS, I used XtreeGold, including its hex editor, to stay in control of everything. On Linux, I've got that same "do it my way" attitude. That's me.

For me, that article pulls together several "commandline incantations" in one place, one of which I spent some time tracking down at one point and trying to understand, so I could script it ('man cdrecord' does not give you instant understanding of how to set up to burn an audio CD, but I was tired of having to hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor to the burner box just to run Xcdroast). I tend to script repetitive tasks, and often cron them so the machine will remember to do them so I don't have to. There are articles I've read which have given me the specific "commandline incantations" I was looking for at the time, saving me a lot of grepping around; I tend to value those and save them promptly to disk as I find them.

I'm not saying your approach is wrong, because it's not. It's your approach. It's not mine. There are lots of other folks like you, and lots of other folks like me. That's part of what Linux is about, that free choice of valid approaches. Maybe that should be the lead paragraph thrust of your article.
tuxchick

Jan 12, 2007
9:52 AM EDT
OMG command line stuff! I'm scared!! Noooooo!! **hits article with stick**

sheesh, if you're scared by this stuff, don't read it.
SFN

Jan 12, 2007
11:12 AM EDT
Oh, please. This isn't a scared thing. It's more like irritation at articles that say this is how it's done in Linux.

As cr said:

Quoting:Perhaps the how-to article you're reacting to should be retitled to "Creating audio CD compilations on Linux at the commandline", thus limiting its declared scope.
The last thing we need is articles that tell newbies that the way to create an audio CD in Linux is to complete steps 1 - 53.
tuxchick

Jan 12, 2007
2:52 PM EDT
Hmm, so your fears are on behalf of other people? That's a rather tricky business- who is this mythical "average user" that is terrified of computers? I don't care to see a perfectly good howto crabbed at for such vague reasons. There are all kinds of howtos, and there's plenty of room to write your own, if you don't like what you're seeing.
herzeleid

Jan 12, 2007
3:04 PM EDT
The man is right, tc! Articles like this provide ammunition for the anti linux fudders. They can point to articles like this and say "see, linux sucks. look at all the hoops you have to jump through to do anything. I can do that in windoze with a few mouse clicks."
DarrenR114

Jan 12, 2007
3:53 PM EDT
I once mentioned to the CFO of my company that we might try endorsing Linux to our customers.

Her reply (this was maybe 6 months ago) "We would never get anyone to use something that looks like DOS". She said this as I sitting in front of my Fedora Core 4 box, with my GNOME desktop plainly visible to her.

TC, I've found that her mentality about Linux is not all that uncommon. And articles like this with the title poorly worded do not help matters.

Sander_Marechal

Jan 15, 2007
2:44 AM EDT
Quoting:Sander, do all current distros pop up a 'create audio CD' applet when an unburned CDR is inserted? Probably not; none of mine do.


I use Ubuntu but I'm pretty certain you can get the popup on any GNOME desktop that auto-mounts CD's. The popup has three buttons: "Create audio CD", "Create data CD" and "Ignore". I'm pretty sure the GNOME preferences allow you to disable the popup (and maybe some distro's ship with the popup disabled).
hkwint

Jan 15, 2007
3:03 AM EDT
Quoting:I can do that in windoze with a few mouse clicks


Well, then it's time to write a 53 step review of how to do the same in Windows. Like installing the drivers from the CD-Rom that accompanied the CD/DVD-R drive, install Nero, look for the code, activate it, and so on. I bet we could make up 53 steps to do it in Windows.

BTW I don't have KDE or Gnome, but K3B does the trick for me. Doing it with K3B is so trivial, a HOWTO would be rather pointless in my opinion. Only thing is, you should run it as root, and if using sudo, you should use sudo -h.
jezuch

Jan 15, 2007
5:14 AM EDT
Quoting:do all current distros pop up a 'create audio CD' applet when an unburned CDR is inserted?


I *hate* those popups. It's like the computer tries to be smarter than me! *Really* annoying.
SFN

Jan 15, 2007
5:31 AM EDT
Quoting:Articles like this provide ammunition for the anti linux fudders. They can point to articles like this and say "see, linux sucks. look at all the hoops you have to jump through to do anything.


Yes, this really is the crux of the matter. And it could all be avoided by not stating that this is how it's done in Linux.
herzeleid

Jan 15, 2007
9:35 AM EDT
Quoting: hkwint on k3b: Only thing is, you should run it as root, and if using sudo, you should use sudo -h.
That's odd - I use k3b all the time to copy cds, burn dvds etc, and I've never run it as root. I simply invoke it from the kde menu as my normal, non-root self.
DarrenR114

Jan 15, 2007
9:47 AM EDT
I've only used k3b on Fedora installs myself - and I've always had to invoke it as root or using sudo.

I've only used it on the GNOME desktops myself.

But I don't run into the same access issues when I use Nautilus' built-in utility to burn a data disk.

So, it may have to do with how Nautilus invokes k3b as opposed to how KDE does.

Just a thought.
techiem2

Jan 15, 2007
10:02 AM EDT
I run k3b as non-root under fluxbox all the time on both of my boxes and never have a problem.
herzeleid

Jan 15, 2007
10:14 AM EDT
I think it's relevant to point out that on the distro I'm using, the ownership of the removable devices, sound, etc assigned to the user who logs into the local kde session. This no doubt explains why I don't need to be root to access the dvd writer.
jimf

Jan 15, 2007
10:24 AM EDT
hkwint on k3b: Only thing is, you should run it as root, and if using sudo, you should use sudo -h.

This is a permissions issue. Make the usr a member of cdrom and you'll be able to use it without root permission.
jezuch

Jan 15, 2007
1:14 PM EDT
Quoting:This is a permissions issue. Make the usr a member of cdrom and you'll be able to use it without root permission.


Not only that - AFAIR some devices need some deep magic applied to them by the burning program and it's not standard behaviour, so they require root permissions to bypass the driver. But k3b is only a graphical front-end for cdrecord (or wodim in Debian), so it doesn't have to run as root, only cdrecord.
tuxchick

Jan 15, 2007
3:06 PM EDT
The K3b setup menu is where you configure permissions. Don't have to run it as root.
hkwint

Jan 15, 2007
11:06 PM EDT
Darn, double reaction.
hkwint

Jan 15, 2007
11:12 PM EDT
Hmm, maybe it's because I don't have KDE installed, but Windowmaker.

Anyway, when run as a normal user, k3b highly recommends me to run cdrecord and cdrdao with root privileges. Other distro's or KDE itself might work around this problem by changing the permissions of cdrecord or cdrdao maybe (making a 'burner' group, or using suid or so), or maybe you have the sudo permissions to run it without a password. As root, it works very fine for me, at least as easy as it did when I still used WinXP.
jdixon

Jan 16, 2007
7:55 AM EDT
> Anyway, when run as a normal user, k3b highly recommends me to run cdrecord and cdrdao with root privileges.

Mine does too (Slackware), but it works fine when run as a normal user. It's probably just K3b being paranoid, ignore it and it should work fine.

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