Creating an Audio CD with mp3cd
I guess the title tells you too much. The reality is that I was given some MP3 files and wanted to put them on a normal audio CD so the non-geeks here could listen to them. Thus, consider this a geek to non-geek conversion article.
First I looked at the obvious candidates in the Multimedia menu and found nothing useful. So, I decided to fire up Adept and see if it had any interesting sounding programs with mp3 in their name or description. The winner was mp3cd that was described as a program to burn audio CDs from MP3, Ogg, ... files. Perfect. I added the sucker and typed in its name.
It gave me a list of options. -n, simulate but don't write, sounded like a good first step. Well, in spite of the fact that it wasn't going to write anything, it complained it could not open the CD device /dev/cdrecorder. So, I fed it the right device with -d /dev/scd0 which brings the whole command line up to
mp3cd -d /dev/scd0 *mp3
It actually seemed to start working, cleaning up (its words) and creating WAV files. But, it then blew up with the folloing messages:
Checking WAV format for track 01 ...
sox did not report channel count:
sox: SoX v14.0.0
sox soxio: Failed reading `01.wav': unknown file type `auto'
Clearly, it was time to think about what that message might really mean. I decided it meant some sox library was missing. Firing up Adept again and looking for sox, I found a bunch of files whose names started libsox. One option was an "all" file. Sold. I clicked and when it was done, gave mp3cd another try.
It worked perfectly. It created a CD and sticking it in the CD player worked fine. And, for me, the good news is that I can do this again without ever having to use a GUI.
Phil Hughes
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Comments
Sweet!
Exactly what I was looking for. Made an Amarok playlist with mixed mp3 and FLAC, created an m3u, used mp3cd, and voila! Valentines Day Mix CD, here we go. :D
Thanks!
I found that
I found that www.linuxfromscratch.org has a great page on k3b dependencies/addons..
first result when you search k3b there. The lib relevant to on-the-fly mp3 decoding is "libmad".
(My search also had a result pertaining to Ubuntu with something about "apt-get install libk3b2-mp3".
Enjoy.
k3b has plugins, folks,
k3b has plugins, folks, including mp3 decoder, .flac decoder, etc. No .shn that I could find yet. Takes some poking around to get all the right libs, admittedly.
Great help
Thanks for this little article, it was exactly what I needed to get mp3cd to work!
My method
I'm a little crazy about the audio cd's I make. I thought I'd share my method.
First is the decoding to WAV from MP3. The key in this command is the mpg123 program.
ls | grep .mp3 | while read line; do mpg123 -w $line.wav $line; done
I usually follow this up with
mkdir Wave
mv *.wav Wave/
Next I'll open Audacity and literally go through each file and compress, normalize, enhance, etc. until I'm happy.
Then I write with K3B using DAO, no pre-emphasis, no post-gap, CD-TEXT enabled for all tracks.
A little crazy... yes.. a little...
Why all the extra
Why all the extra complexity? Is there some corner case I'm not seeing?
mkdir Wave
for file in *.mp3; do mpg123 -w $file Wave/$file.wav; done
What system do you use?
Thanks for the tip Phil!
What system do you use?
I'm asking because I'd like to know why the dependency of mp3cd wasn't installed automatically alongside mp3cd?
Excuse my ignorance please, but I have only used Debian so far and installing mp3cd on my box installed the sox libraries as well so I'm a bit puzzled how it didn't work on your end...
domdelimar.com
Kubuntu 8.04
Yeah, they should have been installed but Kubuntu/Debian dependencies sometimes have some holes in them.
Phil Hughes
Well, you can always use K3B
Well, you can always use K3B :)
I don't think so
K3B will happily create an audio CD if you have the WAV files but, as far as I know, it will not convert MP3 files to WAV files.
Phil Hughes
Brasero
I'm pretty sure Brasero can do this too.