Making a multi-format burn in Gnomebaker
 

Gnomebaker is a great program. Love it. Problem is burning CDs with stuff I've copied across from my Windows parition.

Better say first of all that Windows Vista was the tipping point for me. That's when I finally decided to move to Linux (Ubuntu Feisty Fawn). MediaPlayer 11 is a travesty.

I've imported my music files (and everything else) into Linux. Thanks to a lot of help from folks on Linuxquestions I've even been able to start doing Video editing and statistical analysis in Linux.

Making music CDs, though, still escapes me. I've been able to bring in new CDs into ubuntu in ogg vorbis (and burn them) but when I try to use older things from Windows I'm told I need the correct wma plug-in.

As a Gnome user, I'd already downloaded the ugly plug-ins so I can listen to any wmas in Linux in Totem.

The question is simple: how can I make CDs with wma content (which I can access in Totem but not burn in Gnomebaker). Or will I just have to re-create my music library with the original CDs?

I'm sure the answer is simple. It's obviously a plug-in problem. How do I find out what plug-ins I need or should I switch to a new burning program?

I'm not sure it's a plug-in problem. The vast majority of software on Linux can't handle Microsoft's proprietary formats. Most burning software only handles a few basic formats like wav, mp3, ogg, and perhaps flac. I've never used gnome myself though, so I can't say for sure.

I assume you're talking about making mix CDs and such here, since you mention copying from the original disks. That's actually the best way, since wma, mp3, and ogg are all lossy formats, and you end up with some sound degradation by using them as an intermediate format. And converting from one lossy format to another is even worse.

If you really want to though, you can use software such as ffmpeg or mencoder to convert your .wma files to .wav (or any other format for that matter), which you can then burn to cd. A simple "for" loop can convert all the files in a directory at once. Something like this:

for FILE in `find *.wma` ;do ffmpeg -i $FILE -vn -f wav "$FILE.wav" ; done

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, but thanks for replying and your advice. Very useful.

Especially the bit about converting from lossy format to lossy format. I'd not realised - until I listened closely to some home-built CDs of mine - that the quality really does plummet!

Thanks again.