On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 06:13:46PM +0000, James wrote > I need to learn how to use any simple cdrecording commands (syntax > challeged user here) first. Then I can worry about all sorts of fancy > file types/formats. I'd be better off downloading a know file to > write to the device (ascii text?) or something on the gentoo system, > just to build a little confidence. I need a newbie 'how to cd burn' > before I worry about the intricacies of audio recording files on CDs. > > > 3) (Thanks for the idea, Dave Nebinger) Have you tried making an ISO > > of all the audio files (unaltered) that you want to burn to CD, using > > mkisofs, and then burning the ISO instead of the files? > > > I'm going to read the cdrecord man pages. simple syntax examples > or a link to a document to any cd burning software is what > I need.
A quick rundown... - audio CDs are generated by writing WAV files directly to CD. The player reads them directly from the CD. You do not mount audio CDs. - to get regular files onto CDs in a readable form, you first need to create an ISO9660 filesystem image file, using mkisofs (man mkisofs). Then burn the image file to a CD. You can usually get away with piping output from mkisofs stdout to cdrecord stdin. - you need root privileges to properly use cdrecord; deal with it. If you're scared of logging in as root, you can use sudoers.conf to give a regular user permission to run specific command and parameters. I need root-level access in order to read system files for my bi-weekly backups, so cdrecord's need to be root was never an issue for me. Note; The following is all done as root (or root equivalent). The first thing you have to do is figure out your device numbers. *YOUR SYSTEM CAN BE DIFFERENT FROM MINE*, so read the instructions carefully. Execute the command "cdrecord dev=ATAPI: -scanbus". It can take a few seconds to scan the system. Ignore the warnings/disclaimers The important part is at the end. Here's that output for my system... 0,0,0 0) 'SONY ' 'CD-RW CRX195E1 ' 'ZYS5' Removable CD-ROM 0,1,0 1) 'SONY ' 'DVD-ROM DDU1621 ' 'S1.5' Removable CD-ROM 0,2,0 2) * 0,3,0 3) * 0,4,0 4) * 0,5,0 5) * 0,6,0 6) * 0,7,0 7) * This indicates that my CD-RW is device 0,0,0. mkisofs creates an image of a specified directory, including subdirectories. Soft links do *NOT* work. To save time, and avoid cluttering up my drive with temp files, I pipe directly from mkisofs to cdrecord. I make a tar.bz2 of the files I want backed up, and move the file to directory "xfer". The following script does it all-in-one... #!/bin/sh mkisofs -R -J xfer | cdrecord speed=8 -tao -v fs=8m -data dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 - The "-R -J" parameters should result in mkisofs output that's readable by all linux and Windows machines. The cdrecord parameters are... speed=8 ...the burner on this machine can go up to 48x. But my emergency backup system is a 6-year-old Dell that can only read up to 12x. Oops. This parameter slows down the burner so that the older machine can read its output. -tao "track at once". This allows you to do multi-session CDs. -v I prefer some verbosity in the output. fs=8m The fifo buffer size. The default is 4 megabytes, but I specify 8 megabytes to play safe against under-runs. -data Straight out of the man page... -data is the default, if no other flag is present and the file does not appear to be of one of the well known audio file types. If neither -data nor -audio have been specified, cdrecord defaults to -audio for all filenames that end in .au or .wav and to -data for all other files. dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 This specifies the device. The 3 numbers can be found by running "cdrecord dev=ATAPI: -scanbus" - The hyphen at the end specifies to use stdin as the source file. You will get a standard warning from cdrecord, because it can't know ahead of time whether the piped input will fit onto the CD. -- Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list