Creating Audio CD's

Creating a regular CD from MPs

Sometimes you want to create a legacy cd from a collection of mp3 files - perhaps for someone who has only a cd player or for long trips in cars that have older equipment. Commercial programs like Roxio offer this capability so we were curious to know how easy it is to do under Ubuntu.

We fired up the Brasero disc burning program and selected Create an Audio Disc. We then dragged a bunch on MP3 files into the disc project. Each MP3 file took a little time to process but in a minute or so we were ready to burn.

We click BURN and it starts creating the audio disc.

One thing about this - since it is recreating cd audio from the mp3 lossy format the quality should vary depending on the amount of compression . A 128bit file should sound worse as an audio cd than a 256bit file. The test would be to burn the same file at different bit rates and compare. While audiophiles decry any loss of data as a horror, in fact it can, in some cases, improve the sound. Before CSNY 4 Way Street came out on CD, i had downloaded an mp3 version ripped from the vinyl from Napster. And frankly, after comparing the sound of the two - i preferred listening to the 'lower quality' mp3 as it was more 'listenable'. Not scientific to be sure but similar to hearing a song on the radio and liking it and then buying the CD and hating it. Compression does change the sound but not always for the worse...otherwise why do some people prefer vinyl records with their oddball compression schemes and restricted audio bandwidth?

Ah - cd is finished. Let's test it out...sounds fine to me - of course these speakers are little jbl's so lets move it on upstairs to the psb status goldi's and see how it sounds..

Update

Some pople package their audio into bin/cue files which can be a problem. So i installed the bchunk package which converts a CD image in a .bin/.cue format (sometimes .raw/.cue) into
a set of .iso and .cdr/.wav tracks. The .bin/.cue format is used by some non-UNIX CD-writing software, but is not supported on most other CD-writing programs. Hopefully, this solves the problem.