Linux Multimedia Hacks

Automate Audio CD Burning with K3b

Use K3b to burn your own custom audio CD in just a few clicks.

Even with the advent of high-tech hard drive and flash memory–based media players and sophisticated peer-to-peer file-sharing software, sometimes the simplest way to take your music with you is on a good old-fashioned CD. After all, many home and car stereos still don’t support playing MP3s or other audio formats so if you mix your favorite tracks and burn them to a CD you can play them just about anywhere. Plus, if your CD breaks, it’s quick, easy, and cheap to replace with another burned copy.

Creating a CD used to be a bit of a dark science under Linux and required you to use a number of command-line tools to convert audio files into WAVs if they weren’t already WAVs. Then you would execute another script to burn them onto a CD and, of course, hope that you calculated the song length correctly so your music would all fit on the CD. With K3b, those days are over. K3b (http://www.k3b.org) is a very powerful and very user-friendly graphical CD-and DVD-burning tool. It automates all of the steps that you would normally have to do on the command line and all within a nice simple interface. K3b is a popular package and most distributions have already packaged it for you, so you can install it using your standard software installation tool for your distribution, or alternatively, grab the source from http://www.k3b.org and compile it yourself.

Either launch K3b from your application menu ...