Bunring audio and data CDs in Linux

Linux started its debut as a hackers operating system. So most of the things including burning CDs were (and still are) accomplished using command line tools. Though now there are excellent GUI wrappers available which shield the user by giving a nice front-end to these tools. Before I talk about the GUI available,I would like to dwell a bit on the set of command line tools which do the grunt work of burning CDs and DVDs. In Linux we have an excellent set of command line tools for burning CDs and DVDs. These are as follows:
cdrecord, dvdrecord : These are the tools that actually burn the data or audio tracks on to your CDs and DVDs.
mkisofs : Prior to using cdrecord, you have to create an ISO image of the files you want to burn on to the CD. This tool helps you accomplish that.
growisofs : This is a front-end to mkisofs which can be used to create amoung other things multi-session CD/DVDs.
cdrdao : This is just like cdrecord but can be used to create mixed CDs. That is CDs containing both data and audio tracks.
Here I will give an example each of creating an ISO image using mkisofs as well as burning the ISO image using cdrecord.

Creating an ISO image using mkisofs

syntax 1:

$ mkisofs -R -J -iso-level 2 -o output_filename.iso input_filename/directory

{-J = Jouliet} {ISO Level 1 to 3} {-R = Rockwell} (note: Make sure to put everything on one line)
syntax 2:

$ mkisofs -J -o target_file.iso -path-list your_listof_filenames.txt -graft-points

(Note: This is also one line)
This syntax of mkisofs is used for creating a ISO image from a file containing a list of all the files that should be included in the CD ISO image. The filenames are included one per line.
syntax 3: Creating an image of an already bootable CD

$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/iso/image.iso bs=8M

Burning images on to the CD using cdrecord

This is a two step process.
step 1: Find out the value of the dev option using the command

$ cdrecord --scanbus

step 2: Now burn the image on to the CD using the cdrecord command:

$ cdrecord -v speed=4 -data -eject dev=[the value you got in the previous step] -dao -mode1[2] /path/to/file.iso

(Note: Still one line)

These tools are 100% reliable and are enough to get the job of burning CDs and DVDs. But as you can see, there are a whole lot of options used and, sometimes there is the risk of mistakes happening due to passing wrong options to the commands. Earlier I used to burn CDs using these tools for lack of a reliable and easy to use front-end. But now there are a plethora of GUI front-ends that use these tools in the background and assist the user to burn CDs/DVDs with ease. One of these GUI's I really liked is K3b the CD creator. This package is included in all major Linux distributions including Fedora. When you start K3b, you are provided a clean and simple interface which shows in easy to understand language and icons, the things a user can accomplish. The tasks are divided into four projects that is :
New Audio CD project
New Data CD project
New Data DVD project and
CD to CD copying dialog

Other than those stated above, you can also create mixed CDs containing both audio and data tracks as well as video CDs and DVDs by accessing the [File > New Project] menu. When you give the burn command, you are provided a nice dialog box where you can select to create single session or multi-session CDs.Whether to generate RockRidge, Joliet or UDF extentions for your filesystem and many advanced options like support for ISO level 1,2,or 3 and so on. And erasing and rewriting your RW CD is a clinch. Infact after using this excellent software, I am of the opinion that K3b can be put in the same league as its windows counterpart Nero Burning ROM. Writing CDs/DVDs in linux had never been this easy.

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How to play VCD .dat files using mplayer

Mplayer is a versatile piece of GNU/GPLed video/audio software which supports an astronishing variety of audio and video formats. As you know a VCD has video files by names avesqrt.dat . To play such files in linux (provided you have mplayer) , do the following :

$ mplayer vcd://1

If that doesn't work then specify your cdrom (In my case it is /dev/cdrom but it may be different in your case) device as follows:

$ mplayer -cdrom-device /dev/cdrom vcd://1

Note: You should not mount the cdrom for this to work.

Two other free helps

To play a DVD

$ mplayer dvd://[title [start_title]-end_title] [options]

To see a TV channel (Provided you have a TV tuner card)

$ mplayer tv://[channel] [options]

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Convert a VCD .dat file to .mp3 format

There is an easy way to convert VCD (Video CD) file into MP3. What you need are just MPlayer and Lame. MPlayer is used to convert the VCD file to WAV by using the PCM audio output, and then you can convert the WAV file to MP3 by using Lame. First, you have to convert it to WAV by using the command:

$ mplayer -ao pcm /path/to/vcd/videoname01.dat

MPlayer will play the VCD file like usual, but with no sound. Just wait until it finished. You'll get a file 'audiodump.wav' that you can convert to MP3 by using the command:

$ lame -h audiodump.wav newfile.mp3

Switch -h is used to get high quality MP3 file, but bigger filesize.

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An easy way to play songs remotely/have a media player...

Anyway...this is with XMMS is how I did it...just a kinda "hey this is kinda useful" thing. first things first, install openSSH server, don't really need to do much except start it. Read an install guide for your distro as to how to do it. If you have Ubuntu or the like it'll automatically start it once it's installed. You need openSSH on the client machine(s) but it's usually installed by default so you should be good. I assume you have XMMS, if you don't install it. Install XMMS-shell, it doesn't need any configuration. Open XMMS on the "host" machine. Open a terminal on the client machine and type ssh followed by the IP of the host machine, the first time you do it you'll get a message talking about authentication or something like that, just say yes and it'll ask you for the password. Now you're connected, simply type "xmms-shell" and it'll open up. If it's playing already it'll tell you what track is running, etc. Pretty straight-forward as how to use. Type in "help" and hit enter for the commands of how to use it. Nice thing is, you can run SSH from pretty much anything including your toaster so it's a nice thing to have It'll look like this when you've got it running:

If you run SSH with the -X option it will let you open X applications (like XMMS itself) but this will put a big load on your network, so it's fine to do that (and run XMMS directly, etc.) but that's why I didn't put that in there. Also, you can't run X on a toaster.

Submitted by: Corrector Yui

Alternativly: If you don't think your network has enough bandwidth to use the -X command to shh but you still want to use a GUI what you can do is run fish, apart of SSH, point it to the computer that has the music you want to play and tell it the username and IP of the machine like this

fish://username@ipaddress

Then you can just pull the songs over the network into your temp and play it using your favorite media player.

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