I recently had to re-install Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) after the hard drive died on my IBM T43. HD dead obviously means an upgrade was no option. Hence everything was re-installed from backups.

The previous installation was Ubuntu 10.04. There seem to be a number of compatibility issues but on the whole I've got system working with a few exceptions. I'm guessing that I'll need to start more than one thread to get to the bottom of each problem.

This question concerns Brasero.

I want to burn a number of .mp3 files (approx. 180) onto a CD.

First attempt: I open Brasero from the application menu and select "start audio project". When I start to add the mp3 files, the space usage indicated for the blank CD quickly shoots up. It looks like Brasero wants to do a conversion to .wav or maybe .flac, though I cannot be sure. All I really know is that the 180 files are not going to fit using an audio project, althought the total size is only around 600MB.

Second attempt: I start a data project instead. However, adding files to the project inserts them in a random order, which is definitely not what I want. There doesn't seem to be an option for specifying the order of the files. I could drag and drop each file into the project individually, which might solve the ordering issue, but this would take me close to an hour and is very error prone (I might forget a file).

Third attempt: I checked the man page for Brasero. The following option is specified:
That might solve the ordering issue, so I did this but the command "brasero -n" achieved precisely zero. Ditto for "brasero --ncb". The HD whirred a bit but application simply didn't start.

I checked logs /var/log/dmesg and /var/log/syslog but these show nothing relevant, since they mostly have to do with devices as far as I can tell. Is there another log I should check?

Does anyone know why the above mentioned attempts failed? Is there another way to achieve what I want (i.e. burn 180 .mp3 files in the correct order)?

Any suggestions welcome.

Achim

Regarding the first question, if you select to create an audio CD, any CD burning program will want to convert the files the *.cda format, which is a *.wav format used on audio CD's.

Regarding the second, the idea that comes to me off the top of my head is to rename the files, perhaps by putting "01," "02," etc. at the beginning of the file names. Hardly an ideal solution, I know; perhaps someone will come along with a better one.

Thanks for your suggestions.

You're the second person to confirm that CD audio implies conversion to wav-file. It surprises me a bit but then I'm not really an expert on audio software... not even particularly experienced if it comes to that.

Your suggestion to rename the files is very reasonable and sensible. In fact it's the first thing I did before trying to burn the CD. Sadly, it didn't help. I'm considering writing a PERL script to copy the files over to the burn:/// URI, though I'll need a bit of spare time which I've got precious little of at the moment. I'm busy writing some Java JUnit stuff for my employer and need to be finished by the 2nd... but after that, well, I'll be sure to post the results here and on the other forums I've been on.

Achim

It's the history. When burning programs came along, audio CDs were at the height of their popularity and music CD players were the bees knees; burning an "audio CD" meant creating something that would play in a CD player.

Good luck. I am certain that many persons will be interested in what you find out.

I spent untold hours trawling through various forums and blogs. The result was that I replaced CDRkit with CDRtools but didn't really solve all the issues I had. None-the-less here is a description of what I did:

The replies I got from another query regarding xcdroast lead me to believe that I might be well advised to switch from CDRkit, which comes standard with a number of distros including Ubuntu and Redhat, to CDRtools, which is the original CD/DVD read/write software from which CDRkit was derived. For those not familiar with the issues, there is a long standing argument between the developers of both of these. The issues involved are of little intertest to most users who really just want something that works. It is a bit annoying, that some distros (Ubuntu is one) are tightly bound to CDRkit. It isn't all that easy to change... and I thought Linux was about freedom of choice.

Google "cdrtools vs cdrkit" to find out what the argument is about... and let me know if you understand the issues, because I certtainly don't!

From here on I will assume you've got CDRkit and want to use CDRtools. If you want to do the reverse, I suspect the following steps would work in the reverse direction, too.

Step 1. Locate the whereabouts of cdrecord/wodim, readcd/readom, and mkisofs/genisoimage. In each case the first name will be a symlink to the second. In Ubuntu 12.04LTS (aka precicise pangolin) these will be in /usr/lib.

Step 2. Follow the instructions on this site. There you will find information on how to replace the entries in your "sources.list" file. This controls which repositories are accessed by APT. (I'm not certain what is required if you use RPM or PACMAN or some other package manager.) Some other Links which give further Information are:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu
• http://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList

In my case I chose to do the job manually by updating the sources.list file and used the add-apt-repository and apt-get update commands as described. Another take on this is also described here.

Step 3. Check in /usr/lib to see just what has changed. In my case the binaries wodim, readom, and genisoimage were removed. That last one reported a number of dependency issues, which I'll come back to. Contrary to expectation, cdda2wav was not installed and icedax was not removed, but that was no worry because I haven't had any problems with audio file conversions.

Step 4. Create symlinks to the newly installed programs: wodim -> cdrecord, genisoimage -> mkisofs, and readom -> readcd. The syntax for doing this for cdrecord, for instance, is
At least one blog suggested that symlinks do not work but hard links do (see the comments at the top from TechZilla in this forum). Creating the symbolic or hard links should resolve any "missing dependency" issues.

Step 5. Test!! You should have no difficulty creating an ISO image, burning CDs, and reading CDs.

I would not recommend doing this sort of thing just for the sake of it. It's a fair bit of work and something might go wrong. Remember the programmer's maxim: If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Besides, not all my problems have been solved. I can now burn CDs without getting random errors like "an error occurred". (Can you beleive that? I actually got that message in a Linux app! No info in the logs either. )

I'm happy not to be getting that sort of problem anymore, however, Brasero still doesn't sort the files alphabetically and the order in which they appear on the CD is uncertain. To avoid this issue, use the CD Creator in Gnome when you want to burn a data CD. If anyone has further info on what Brasero "thinks" it's doing with the random ordering, then please let me know.

Cheers

Achim