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.