Not sure what to do here, since i never got into copying music and or ripping.

I have a few dozen mp3 files of various artists that i need to put to CD.
These are needed for an upcoming 'Suicide Awareness' event.
Somehow i was volunteered for this task.

My question:
What format do i need to convert these MP3s to so they can be played on a normal Cd player?

Thanks

You have to convert them to WAV, the music audio CD format. There are a lot of tools that can perform the conversion. I personally use lame:
The for loop converts all the MP3 files in the current directory, substituting the .mp3 suffix with .wav. Disclaimer: I assume you have fulfilled any copyright issue, in order to air these songs in a public event.

The program you'd use in slackware will be cdrecord or wodim. The man pages tell you how.
There are gui fronts for them like K3B, which makes the process very simple.

If you have a fairly complete slackware build, you can often just put a blank CD in to start an application, select "audio CD" from a menu. If this does not happen, you open up a CD ripper, which provides a two-pane dialog and does the correct recoding for you.

A stereo CD is burned in CD-DA format and needs structured audio data files. This usually means .au or .wav files. The command may be as simple as:

wodim -audio *.wav

... depending on what options you want to take advantage of and your exact setup.

Thanks Guys!

I am on it... as soon as i'm done with other 'honey dos'

2nd on using k3b. Pretty painless and reliable.

Check at Sams club. For this type of stuff they will often donate the burnable media.

A lot of the burning tools will do the conversion for you. That being said, the format that is actually burned is .cdr. Which is the same as .wav, but the bit order is reversed (big endian). Assuming that .wav is 16 bit, 44.1kHz and stereo aka 2 channels. Sox should be able to do the conversion if you need to manually. I generally do it manually because it saves a bit of reprocessing if I need to burn multiple copies. Plus the .wav versions might be a work in progress where .cdr is pretty finalized IMO. Or at least easier to pick out in a crowd. i.e. where did I put those files again? find / -iname '*.cdr'

The following discussion probably counts as "too much info" for the OP

.cdr is also the file extension for Corel Draw drawings and iso9660 files created in MacOS X

I thought .cdr was used for a raw audio CD image rather than tracks? I had to look quite hard to find references to this use.

Audio CDs use the Red Book CD-DA standard (IEC 60908) - sometimes called CDR.
Which is big-endian. Swapping the bytes is usually implimented in standard burners.
It also needs to be without a header - which will otherwise be audible as a click at the start of the track.
Programs use converters which strip the headers, or they know to skip the headers of common formats which are almost right (a la wodim with sony au and microsoft wav).

CDDA audio format: The file with data for this tracks should contain stereo, 16-bit digital audio with 44100 samples/s. The byte order should be the following: MSB left, LSB left, MSB right, LSB right, MSB left and so on. The track should be a multiple of 2352 bytes.

Strictly speaking, yep, stored digital audio cannot be assumed to have a 44k1Hz sample rate - all should be resampled. However, wav files ripped from a CD at defaults is usually at the correct rate. It is very common to recode to wav - though sox will convert to cdda too. Example:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...MP3-CD-Burning

I'm used to raw cdda audio files having extension .cdaudio - I'm guessing MS .cda is similar.

A typical CLI ripping process would be:

note:
Some types of CD-Writers e.g. Yamaha, Sony and the new SCSI-3/mmc drives require audio data to be presented in little-endian order, while other writers require audio data to be presented in the big-endian (network) byte order normally used by the SCSI protocol.

Some audio CDs are deliberately manufactured to be non-complying - usually for DRM-type reasons.
Look for the "compact disk digital audio" logo - if it ain't there, it ain't complying.

Interestingly, the wodim man-page claims that it's cd-da writing is "similar to redbook" not the same as. I've not been able to find out more.

thank you all!

I have to say I am well educated now.
when and if my future Mac user step-son is need of ripping/conversion advise, I am there.

basically

$ sox input.wav output.cdr
(and it takes care of the particulars.)

$ cdrecord -audio -tao track1.cdr track2.cdr track3.cdr .......
(-dao if you don't want the default 2 second pause between tracks)

or at least that's how I do it. And various extras if you want index, cd-text, and other things. I'm still not quite learn-ed on that stuff myself.