Pro quality CD burning?

[sysrqer]

I need to burn a CD master of an album I am having duplicated and printed etc but I have never done any CD burning in linux. Is k3b ok to use? The duplication company recommend Nero and Roxio for Windows but I don’t think this is necessary. I need it to be error free, that’s the main requirement really.

Any things I should do not avoid when burning the master? I noticed k3b has a lot of features (such as embedding the tags and stuff) but I’m not really sure if there are particular things I should look for when doing this.

[Brian]

k3b or Brasero should be able to do what you need.

I used to have a program called DeeVeeDee that would build up audio/video/data discs on CD or DVD, and output to an iso9660-compliant ".iso" file. I would typically then "duplicate" that iso file directly to disk from the command line, using 'dd':

dd if=/path/to/output.iso of=/path/to/raw/device bs=4M

the if (input file) parameter is the full path to the ISO file I created using DeeVeeDee.
the of (output file) parameter is the full path to the CD/DVD drive (with blank media inserted)
the bs (block size) parameter sets the default/max size for transfer blocks during the copy.

dd does a raw device copy, so it can be used in a similar manner to "burn" bootable ISO files (virtually any "bootable" or "live cd" Linux install file) directly to CD, DVD or USB thumb drive.

- Brian

[sadko4u]

I need to burn a CD master of an album I am having duplicated and printed etc but I have never done any CD burning in linux. Is k3b ok to use? The duplication company recommend Nero and Roxio for Windows but I don’t think this is necessary. I need it to be error free, that’s the main requirement really.

Any things I should do not avoid when burning the master? I noticed k3b has a lot of features (such as embedding the tags and stuff) but I’m not really sure if there are particular things I should look for when doing this.

I've done an album once. k3b is pretty enough. You need:
- UPC for your disk
- ISRC for each song.
Then burn it to the master disk (simple CD-R) specifying UPC and ISRC and bring to the duplication company.

[mr_p]

When I was self-releasing my first album (in 2009 year) on CD - 'master' was just term for audio-cd matrix disc for copying. Therefore it was just audio tracks burned from 16bit wave files.
I was making master cd under Windows in Nero and the duplication company stated that any regular software for burning audio-cd would be good for that.
As I remember, one thing that I should be aware of was the silence between songs - at the end of each song there was a fade-out and silence but Nero had an option to add silence (which was useless in that case).

But that was in 2009

[ufug]

I just spent way too much time working on the same thing. Ardour/Mixbus can supposedly export a Red Book CD (which is what you want, yes?). Sure enough, you can put all your stereo masters in a session, define ranges, insert all the song/artist/ISRC info, and export the entire session as a single PCM audio file with TOC and CUE files. Then you can write it using the TOC file with cdrdao. Sadly there is not much documentation that I could find on cdrdao other than the man page, but through trial and error I did get it to work. There's a little related info here.

This was a pain anyway because cdrdao worked (it created the CD) but would not write the CD with CD-TEXT info, and if you wanted to make any changes (track order, edits, spacing changes) you basically had to start over.

In the end I found out two things: 1) Brasero will do all this in the GUI with individual wav files and works like a charm, and 2) most/many CD manufacturers do not really require Red Book like in the old days. In fact, many of them prefer you simply upload stereo wavs.

If the manufacture you are working with requires the physical CD, give try it with a Brasero disc first, I suspect they will not even blink.

[mr_p]

Thx 42low!
I never heard of it, but it looks like a simple tool for getting things done

[sysrqer]

I did, thank you to everyone for the comments.
k3b seems to have a bug where the CD-TEXT gets missed for the first track title.
Xfburn does appear to support CD-TEXT at all.
The winner was Brasero, quite a simple program but worked very well the first time, CD-TEXT read from tags with no editing needed.