Burning Audio CDs - Another Way

[wolvenwraith]

I found that I needed to burn albums of mp3's many times, and I hated all the GUIs out there that do it (poor ATAPI support, bad layout, etc. etc.). I am also a big fan of the powerful Linux CLI. So I hacked something up in order to solve these problems. All you need to do is put all your mp3's into one directory and run this script (I called it mp3burn and copied it into /usr/bin so I can run it anytime, it's nice to have).

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#!/bin/bash
 
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done
for i in *.mp3; do lame --decode $i `basename $i .mp3`.wav; done
normalize *.wav
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=44 -pad -audio -v -gracetime=2 *.wav
rm *.wav

Note that the cdrecord line may need to be modified in order to accomadate your burner (notably the dev=, and speed= lines) and gracetime can be modified as you see it as well.

Don't forget to run chmod a+x on the file so that it is executable!

Notes: Just improved it a little bit, it now normalizes (emerge normalize) the .wav files and removes them after they're burnt. Also fixed the [Mm][Pp] thing in the first line. This little script should be pretty easy to alter if it doesn't fit you perfectly. Keep in mind too, this will change the names of you mp3's if they have spaces or caps in them.

[pem725]

What do you do with the wav files after burning?

Also, you might find burncenter allows you a similar setup with a few more features. Nice work though.

Like you, I am a fan of the CLI and use abcde and burncenter as console apps - along with the usual straightforward calls to cdrecord.

[d99ma]

Perhaps you should check for [mM][pP] when removing spaces, normalize the wav files and remove them after burning. Then it would be perfect!

/Martin

[wolvenwraith]

Thanks for the feedback. I checked out burncenter and it seems pretty cool. However, it doesn't seem to support ATAPI burning out of the box (I didn't play with it much so I could be wrong). The other thing is I sorta like the one-liner style of this script, but that's just me . All in all though burncenter seemed pretty nice.

Thanks to both of you for the suggestions, I made all the necessary changes to the script.

[Elm0]

Nice script, obviously going to be quicker than a GUI if you do this a lot, however well designed the GUI is. The beauty of linux I suppose, why be forced into one way when you can choose your path!

[Munck]

Thanks for the script. I've been looking for some easy way to do this, but I've been too lazy to write a script myself

[pengo]

Hello there! I'm new at this and have a fresh install of Gentoo. What would I need to emerge for this script to work?

Thanks for the contribution!

[MrNugget]

Just "emerge cdrtools" and you'll be able to use cdrecord.

[dr_strange]

emerge cdrtools lame

[BakaO]

Hello,

your script is veyr cool, but I have 2 questions :

1-Is the 'normalize' really neccesary ? (I think if the dB levels are not the same, it is normal, no ?)

2-How can we add cd-text support ? I think it is related with the .inf files but how can we auto-generate them (form id-tag) or other method.


Thanks for all !

[TechSmurf]

I would just like to say, Thanks.
This little file saved me alot of time and work.
Keep up the good work.

(it worked 'right out of the box' )

[TheEternalVortex]

What's the point of renaming all the files?

[metalh34d]

doesn't converting mp3 into a wav cause lower quality sound, or is this just the way all mp3 burning is done?

[icefox13]

doesn't converting mp3 into a wav cause lower quality sound, or is this just the way all mp3 burning is done?

Every compressed audio file (mp3, ogg) has to be converted to wav if you make an audio-cd (not mp3-cd), because wav is the format the tracks are stored on the disc.
(But you sometimes can't see this when burning an audio-cd because the mp3s are decoded and recorded nearly simultaneously.)

[metalh34d]

I tried using the script and it didn't work very well. It only burned 2 tracks in the folder I had set to burn to cd. Also it took a very long time and it will only play in my car. Then again I'm having problems with burned cds playing on my cdroms anyway. Any help? Please?

[MighMoS]

Could it be added to rename the files back to their originals? Or at least how would I create a script that would remove the underscores? (I have very little programming experience)

[diegs]

No renaming:

Code: Select all

  GNU nano 1.3.2           File: /home/diegs/music/burn.sh
                                                                                
#!/bin/bash
                                                                                
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do lame --decode "$i" "`basename "$i" .mp3`.wav"; done
normalize *.wav
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=24 -pad -audio -v -gracetime=0 *.wav
rm *.wav

[Spack]

This will handle ogg vorbis files aswell:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done
for i in *.[Oo][Gg][Gg]; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done
for i in *.[Oo][Gg][Gg]; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done
for i in *.mp3; do lame --decode $i `basename $i .mp3`.wav; done
for i in *.ogg; do oggdec $i; done
normalize *.wav
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=44 -pad -audio -v -gracetime=2 *.wav
rm *.wav

[fireboy1919]

doesn't converting mp3 into a wav cause lower quality sound, or is this just the way all mp3 burning is done?

wav is an uncompressed, lossless temporal format - the analog of bmp files in graphics.

mp3, on the other hand, is a compressed, lossy format, and whenever you convert to it, you lose information. Even if you do not compress at all you'll degrade the signal some when you convert to mp3 because it converts it to discrete cosine space (similar to doing a discrete fourier transform), and there's some loss of signal just from converting to it and back. You always have to convert back because you we listen to audio in temporal, not frequency space. Might as well do it by converting it to wav first.

Most people cannot hear the artifacts caused by the conversion; most people can't even hear the artifacts caused by removing a chunk of the signal after this conversion.

The real thing that you have to worry about is lower sample rates, which can cause aliasing if you sample at lower than twice the frequency of the highest frequency in the signal. As long as that doesn't happen (and it's not likely if you keep the audio at CD quality - 48kHz), you probably won't have problems. Well...there are a few more possible problems, but they're a lot less likely.

[freebit50]

I love this little script!!! I was going to install k3b, but it was going to install a bunch of junk that I didn't want to wait for. This script works great, however, I added a little bit to it so cdrecord doesn't get messed on on weird filenames. I also made it so that in the end all the original files are back with no filename modifications. I also added comments. My CS teachers at school are always whining about comments and stuff.


Gotta go for a cruise with the new cd I just burned!!! Laters....

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

#
# create backups so that we leave originals untouched
#
mkdir ./bak
cp *.mp3 ./bak

#
# get rid of of stuff in the filename that could fubar cdrecord
#
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d '-'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d '_'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d '('`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d ')'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d '+'`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d "'"`; done
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]3; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr -d '[0-9]'`; done
# oops, stripped the 3 from mp3....gotta add it back in
for i in *.[Mm][Pp]; do mv "$i" `basename $i .mp`.mp3; done

#
# decode mp3 to wav using lame
#
for i in *.mp3; do lame --decode $i `basename $i .mp3`.wav; done

#
# normalize is a tool for adjusting the volume of audio files 
# to a standard level.
#
normalize *.wav

#
# let us burn!!!
#
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=16 -pad -audio -v -gracetime=2 *.wav

#
# get rid of temp files and restore originals
#
rm *.wav
rm *.mp3
mv ./bak/*.mp3 ./
rm -rf ./bak 

[AGM]

You could also check out bashburn, that's what I use. It's very cool.

[MighMoS]

Rather than moving all these files back and forth, wouldn't just using symlinks be easier?

[freebit50]

Rather than moving all these files back and forth, wouldn't just using symlinks be easier?

Code: Select all

Probrably. I am a newb and didn't think of it. On the other hand, when I was doing the testing, for the 16 songs that I used to fill a cd, all the moving around seemed instantanious. 

[agnitio]

Why not use [:upper:] and [:lower:] insead of [A-Z] and [a-z] so that it works for non-english characters as well.

[cottonmouth]

I also added comments. My CS teachers at school are always whining about comments and stuff.

Very nice. I don't know shell-scripting, but your comments make unintelligble bash-code much more understandable. Thanks!

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Matsumoto created Ruby, and no matter if you're interested in the language, his philosophy is enriching for all developers, no matter how skilled one is or which language one works in. Read more here