[RndTbl] burning MP3 blues

[Gilbert E. Detillieux]

According to Mel Seder:
> I tried burning an audio CD using (Fedora CORE 1) Nautilus.

By "audio CD", do you mean you want to create an actual audio CD,
technically referred to as CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) format?
In that case, the mp3's typically have to be decoded into raw or wav
format.

> I put it a blank CD and a burn/// window popped up.
> I copied mp3's to it and did a burn.
> It plays in my PC when i open the CD and click on a song's icon (xmms gets
> fired up) but the CD player app doesn't play it.

What you've likely created that way is an ISO-format CD-ROM, with a bunch of
MP3 files in the root directory of the CD.  That should play fine in CD
players and DVD players that can handle MP3 format, but those tend to be a
bit more rare.

> As a matter of interest the
> following appears on the CD Player Screen.  I didn't burn anything that
> resembled the following.
> ================================
> "Disney's Magic Kingdom"        
> "SpectroMagic Light Parade"      
> "1-Spectromagic"                
> ================================

I'm assuming it did a CDDB lookup, based on the hashed disc ID, and it just
happened to match some random title in their database, even though there's
no actual match between the two discs.  That often happens with data CD's,
if an audio player happens to try a CDDB lookup.

> It appears as one file/song to my stereo's CD player and no sound is produced.

Yes, the ISO file system will be recorded as one "track" on the CD-ROM, so
CD players would see one track.  But the track is marked as having a mode
other than audio, so they won't play.  (That's how you can get audio CD's
that also have a CD-ROM component that you can read on your computer, such
as the "Enhanced CD" format that is used for a lot of pop releases.)

> I've burned (burnt?) MP3's before when I was a couple years younger and I don't
> know what is going wrong.
> 
> Can anyone give me a command line for burning mp3's in /tmp/burn/ to a CDR
> using cdrecord with parameters?

As I've said above, it sounds like what you've produced should work fine on
players that can handle MP3 discs.  But if you want standard CDDA format,
you'll need to decode the MP3 files (mplayer or mpg123 can do this for you),
then you need to record those audio files, preferably in DAO (disc at once)
mode, to a CD-R (cdrecord or cdrdao can do that).

You should be able to find a tutorial online to help you do this, just by
doing a Google search with enough of the techie buzzwords I've given you
here.  :)

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail:	<gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Computer Science	Web:	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
University of Manitoba		Phone:	(204)474-8161
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA  R3T 2N2	Fax:	(204)474-7609