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What I do:

I record and mix audio using Ardour or Harrison Mixbus. Most of the time now, I don't need to create an master audio cd: bands ans artists are happy enough with audio files. Providing them with high quality .wav files, and some mp3 or .aac is enough nowadays.

However, for a new project, I will have to do again a master audio cd. It is used as a reference to press audio cd.

The issue:

In the past, with Ubuntu or Ubuntu Studio, I used gCDmaster, a GUI for cdrdao. It is not available anymore in repositories, for a long time.

With Ardour or Mixbus, I can export one long .wav file and the .toc description file.

So I am looking for a burning software that:

  • can import one long .wav file, or many short .wav files
  • can import .toc or .cue files for tracks information
  • can edit and save tracks informations (e.g: cd text)
  • can burn the cd at lowest speed possible for the burner (less errors possible)

Any idea ?

(Brasero and k3b can not do that)

ttoine
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  • did you try k3b ? – JoKeR Mar 31 '15 at 19:37
  • will k3b install al lot of dependencies, like other KDE applications ? – ttoine Mar 31 '15 at 20:09
  • not much look at my answer here http://askubuntu.com/questions/588384/how-to-configure-soundjuicer-mysterious-mp3-encoding-settings/591597#591597 it referes to different question but to audio also. – JoKeR Mar 31 '15 at 20:18
  • this is not at all the same kind of issue... – ttoine Mar 31 '15 at 20:21
  • +1 to K3b. The dependencies will not cause a problem and IMO K3b has been the most reliable. – Panther Mar 31 '15 at 20:22
  • @ttoine don't pay much attention to issue though as I said it referes to different one but k3b does what it should. :) that answer just contain all the needed packages to install. – JoKeR Mar 31 '15 at 20:29
  • tested, k3b is just an equivalent of Brasero, but for KDE. Good to burn an audio cd with many tracks or files. Not for making a master cd. And k3b needs more than 40Mb of dependencies, including many KDE libs. – ttoine Mar 31 '15 at 20:38
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    why don't you install gcdmaster then? – JoKeR Mar 31 '15 at 20:43
  • read my question. not available anymore in repositories, not maintained anymore. – ttoine Mar 31 '15 at 20:45
  • yeah my bad I see that you can manually do so if it work https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+package/gcdmaster – JoKeR Mar 31 '15 at 20:50
  • It looks like it would be possible to rebuild the gCDmaster package for 12.04 fairly easily, later releases may need to borrow some bits from 12.04. Note if it is a GUI for cdrdao you probably just use that... – Wilf Mar 31 '15 at 20:55
  • It could be possible to build from source on 14.04 x64 (my current ubuntu box) if the MP3 and OGG support things get satisfied - see here. For building stuff it may help to install build-essential fakeroot & devscripts, as well as libgtkmm-2.4-dev for dependices. checking for LIBGUIMM2... no seems to be the biggest issue to deal with – Wilf Mar 31 '15 at 21:03
  • Found issue with needing http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/libs/libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-1c2a but need a build number less than 2.22... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell giving up for now :( – Wilf Mar 31 '15 at 21:12
  • by the way, the aim is to burn high quality audio. So I don't need ogg or mp3 support. Wave only is enough. – ttoine Mar 31 '15 at 22:07

1 Answers1

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You can keep on using cdrdao, without a GUI, from the command line.
In theory, it should be as simple as: 

cdrdao write album-master.toc

but in practice, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. Here's what I had to do:

  • simulate - Before anything else, let's use simulate instead of write. It'll avoid ruining a CDr if an error occurs. We'll revert back to write once a simulation has completed with success.

  • device - Next, it can't hurt to specify which drive you want to use. cdrdao scanbus will list your drive(s) address(es). I wanted to use /dev/sr0 so added this to the command: --device /dev/sr0

  • driver - By default cdrdao uses the generic-mmc driver, and by default this driver doesn't write CD-TEXT. We have to specifically state that we want to also burn the text by setting the driver bit to 0x10 like this: --driver generic-mmc:0x10

  • speed - I haven't used that option as cdrdao detects the speed of the drive automatically, but if you want you can add --speed 4 to the command to force your drive to write at that speed (mine won't go below 16).

So now the command looks more like this: 

cdrdao simulate --device /dev/sr0 --driver generic-mmc:0x10 album-master.toc
  • Ardour's TOC - cdrdao can be a bit sniffy with the toc files generated by Ardour(5):
    • If you used the Performer field in any of Ardour's CD markers, then it has to be filled in for every track, otherwise cdrdao fails.
    • We have to open the toc file in a text editor to manually edit the TITLE and PERFORMER of the whole cd, located in the first CD_TEXT block (but do not add a COMPOSER entry there or cdrdao will fail).
    • Whilst we're here, Ardour hardcodes the wav file location which means that if we ever move the .wav and .toc files to a different folder/device, cdrdao will not find the .wav file and fail. So it's worth doing a quick search-and-replace-all:
      FILE "/home/xxxxx/ardour/album-master/export/album-master.wav"
      FILE "album-master.wav"

If the simulation now runs successfully, you can replace simulate by write and be on your way. In my case I had to work around a couple more bugs:

  • Bugs
    • For some reason when opening a session, Ardour seems to convert my first CD marker to a Location marker, which then messes up the exported TOC file. So I have to fix that every time before exporting.
    • I kept the most annoying/weird bug for last. cdrdao kept failing with this error:
      ERROR: Cannot set write parameters mode page.
      and telling me to Please try to use the 'generic-mmc-raw' driver.
      But changing the command to --driver generic-mmc-raw would also fail, this time with a different error:
      ERROR: Write data failed.
      Then sometimes, seemingly at random, everything would work perfectly and I could write as many cds as I wanted.
      Eventually I worked it out: first run the command once with --driver generic-mmc-raw, let it fail with the Write data failed error, and after that the command with --driver generic-mmc:0x10 works fine. Go figure...
pevinkinel
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