I just had a few questions. I'm fairly new to Linux and just decided to get a copy of Mandrake 9.1 up and running on my system. So far, so good. I was looking for a good program to burn CDs and decided to give Xcdroast a try. I have it installed and everything, but I was wondering if mp3s have to be converted to .wav files everytime you want to burn an audio cd. It seems like a lot of work just to get a cd burned. Is there another program that's better for this task? I'm using Gnome at the moment for my GUI. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

GToaster is supposed to be good, and it burns files pretty well however I've not gotten it to successfully burn an audio CD yet. However I think that's because I don't have Sox installed. But you could give it a try, its got a better UI than XCDRoast.

the xcdroast manual suggests using lame

http://www.xcdroast.org/manual/createaudio.html

-- you could create a simple script to convert multiple mp3's with one command

run a search for scripting howtos and post in the programming forum (I'd suggest something, but my scripting knowledge is pretty poor )

This script will create an audio cd from a bunch of MP3s in a directory (i didnt write so don't ask me for help)

#!/bin/sh
tocfile="cd_$$.toc"
echo "CD_DA" > $tocfile
for i in *mp3
do wav="`basename $i .mp3`.wav"
mpg123 -w$wav $i\
&& echo -en >>$tocfile "TRACK AUDIO\nFILE \"$wav\" 0\n"
done
echo -e "TOC file still available at $tocfile"
cdrdao write $tocfile