Linux Multimedia Hacks

Burn Audio CDs from the Command Line

Use cdrecord directly from the command line to create your own audio CDs.

There are a lot of advanced GUI programs for Linux that make it easy to burn your own audio CDs from files you have on your computer. Almost all of these programs, however, still function as a frontend for cdrecord—the command-line CD-burning Swiss Army knife. While GUIs are nice, for basic audio CDs, you’ll find that it’s almost as easy to burn the CD directly from the command line. This hack walks you through the process of preparing and burning your own audio CD from standard audio files you might have on your system.

The first step to burn an audio CD is to prepare the audio files. In the past audio files had to be converted to CDDA format for cdrecord to recognize them, but nowadays cdrecord works equally well with WAV files. Depending on the format of your audio files, you will use different tools to convert them to WAV files. Converting from autio format to another is discussed in [Hack #35] .

Once your audio files are ready, the next step is to discover which CD-ROM device cdrecord will use. Run cdrecord with the -scanbus argument and cdrecord will probe and detect any CD burners on your system and which device entry to use. The exact method to use will vary depending on whether you use the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel series. The 2.4 kernel series required that CD burners use SCSI emulation with the ide-scsi module, so your IDE CD burner on /dev/hdc might be accessed through ...