burn-cd: In spite of its age, quite useful

Looking over the Sourceforge page, burn-cd seems to have seen its best days almost six or seven years ago, and if I’m reading that right had its last update in 2009. I know that means it won’t appeal to some people, but bear with me:

Because burn-cd works fine once it’s pointed at your optical drive, and has your files in tow.

It requires no more prodding than the folder or files or ISO you want to write. And it keeps you well informed of its progress, in color and updated constantly. No guessing about what’s happening out there in CD land.

Technically it’s old enough to default to /dev/hdc for your CD burner, so you’ll want to set it to /dev/sr0 or what have you in .burn-cd.conf. While you’re at it, I recommend the verbose = yes setting, which does send a lot more information to the console.

But after that, it’s just burn-cd /home/kmandla/files, and the deed is done. I like that.

Ordinarily I would push for some kind of interface and maybe some push-buttons or a couple of spinny thingies while it’s writing, but the word of the day for burn-cd is “clean and simple.” Nicely done. 😉

burn-cd is in AUR but doesn’t show up on the Debian search pages. Perhaps it was once part of the Debian arsenal but has been sloughed off; if that’s the case, it’s a pity. 😕

simpleburner: Of dubious ability

I’ve got a script on the list named simpleburner, that appears to work for command-line CD burning.

It does seem to make the task of working with cdrkit a little bit easier. It has flags for both ISOs and data CDs, although I don’t see an option for digital-audio-to-audio-CD.

Some issues though:

1. The dates in the repo suggest it’s a few years beyond attention.
2. The script comes as a pair, in perl and python versions. The python version wouldn’t work for me.
3. The perl version seems to work, but also seems to ignore all the flags given to it … which, as you might imagine, makes things a little difficult.
4. Technically it’s possible to hard-code the name of an ISO and other criteria into the script, but that seems to defeat the purpose.

Aside from that, it spun up my /dev/sr0 with no issue, wodim was happy to play along, and things seemed to be moving in the right direction. Even if it was trying to delete a mysterious ISO that didn’t exist, and so forth.

I only see simpleburner in AUR; I don’t think this ever passed muster for Debian.

I hold no ill will toward simpleburner; I suspect it’s just fallen out of step with its underlying software. If you need a command line CD burner, I think I would recommend any of a few others before this though. 😕

mybashburn: Much the same animal

Back in September, when I was wading through the B section, I stepped across bashburn. Here’s its derivative, mybashburn.

To read the home page for mybashburn, it sounds very much like a viable offshoot of the original project, and I can see some similarities here and there.

As for which holds the higher ground, I don’t have an answer. I’m still sitting in that loop I mentioned earlier, where I only rarely need to burn a CD (and oddly, it’s usually to test something for this site 😕 ).

So if you prefer one or the other, that is your decision.

mybashburn is not in Debian (bashburn is, and both are in Arch/AUR), which surprises me in a way. I could swear this was one of the earliest console-only CD writers I ran across, years ago, when I was using Ubuntu.

This is another program where I feel obligated to mention that the last update was nearly six years ago. Ordinarily that’s not an issue, but for CD support software and access protocol, I have a fear that it might be.

Now go forth, and etch tiny lines in lacquer-coated circles of polycarbonate. 😉

mp3cd: Reverse direction, or should be

I’m going to include mp3cd here today, even though I was a little less than successful with it.

You can look through those error messages, and see if you spot the issue. For my own part, I think this might be out of date with the perl substructure. But I am no perl wizard. Perhaps you are. 😉

I will mention that while there were spaces in the filenames for the music, I had a completely different set of errors. So I consider this an improvement, even though I don’t think this is what should have happened.

And what should have happened? If I understand the home page right, I think this should read an m3u file and send it straight to CD. Sort of a one-shot straight-to-disc tool.

But as you can see, it fell short. If you have any clues, let me know. I have a feeling this is probably workable, but might need some surgery first.

dvdauthor: Also available to you

I have to mention dvdauthor as a solution for creating DVDs — like the kind you put in an actual DVD player — at the command line.

I also have to be honest though, and admit that I have never used the console to create a DVD and — thought it pains me to say it — I doubt I ever would. Just looking at the help flags for dvdauthor is daunting.

To be clear though, dvdauthor — with which I can find no faults — is an option which is available to you.

Like a lot of the “tools” I run into, dvdauthor is actually a suite of utilities, all revolving around the creation of a DVD, without a graphical interface.

At this point though, I have to admit that I lack experience with creating machine-compatible DVDs altogether, so you may have to experiment with this one.

But like I have mentioned for some other applications … purpose aside, it exists, apparently it works, and it’s available. More than that, I can’t say. 😐

cdrtools, cdrkit and cdrskin: Untying the knot

Let me see if I have this straight.

In the beginning, there was cdrtools. Most everybody used it, and nobody had any complaints.

Then in 2006, the programmer changed the license from the GPL to the CDDL, although I don’t know why.

All is well except for Debian, whose grand poo-bahs say, “Hey, that there ain’t in line with our philosophies.” Although I don’t know why.

So in what could only be called a coup d’état, the Debian masterminds scalp the last GPL-licensed release of cdrtools, dub it cdrkit, and promise to keep stride with whatever happens in the original. Although I get the general idea why.

So now there were two symmetric projects, and sometimes one is available in your distribution. Sometimes the other. Sometimes … both! Although I don’t know why.

Here’s where things get even more blurry for me. Along comes cdrskin, which is part of a separate project, but is designed as a drop-in replacement for cdrtools’ original cdrecord program.

So there’s a CD burner project, plus another that mimics it but is licensed differently, and yet a third that pretends to be the original, but actually comes from a completely different direction. And I don’t know why.

Now there is a strong possibility that some or all of this little drama has been misunderstood on my part. If so, my sincerest apologies.

But in short, if I’m right, all three should look roughly the same.

And this time … maybe I know why. 😐

cdw: A proper console application

I always like finding a good, well designed console application.

Not out of any sense of spite, but because it reinforces something I decided a very long time ago: that in many cases, console or even CLI applications can do just as much, and just as well, as graphical counterparts.

cdw is like that. Here’s something that looks and behaves just as a graphical application might.

Configuration, CD composition, status and disc info … everything is right up front and easy to navigate.

Lots of colors too. I like colors.

I like this arrangement over something like bashburn too. I acknowledge that bashburn works (I just used it the other day, as a matter of fact), but the menu arrangement and configuration are sometimes obtuse for me.

No matter. cdw and bashburn are both choices, and that’s what this is all about: choice. 😉

burn: An aptly named script

burn took me a long time to find, and then when I did find it, I found I had to twist myself around to take a look at it.

For one thing, the AUR version doesn’t seem to build for me — it required python-eye3d, which must have been in AUR at some point, but isn’t now.

Luckily Debian has it in its repositories; the downside being that I have something else installed on the D600 right now, and couldn’t get to it right away.

All that is immaterial. What little I can show of burn is above. Best I can tell, it works, although what you see there is Mint on the x86_64, and I don’t have a USB CD player for the Acer.

A lot of entanglements here, don’t you think?

Please don’t let that color your opinion of burn. I didn’t go all the way to burning a CD with it, but the preliminary runs seemed fine.

It has a configuration system, and the readme files have lots of examples. If the standard command-line flags for CD burning are too configured or you just want something simpler, this might be the answer. 😉

bashburn: Circular reasoning

It’s been a very long time since I used bashburn.

There are two reasons for that. First, because my initial work with bashburn was less than successful. That was about seven years ago though, so that criticism doesn’t really hold much water now.

The other reason is my slow and eventual drift away from CDs. That’s not a personal transformation, just a tendency to rely more and more on USB drives over optical media.

Where I used to burn CDs as backups, I now just use leftover hard drives and drive enclosures. And where I used to burn CDs to install distros, I now just inject ISOs onto flash drives with unetbootin.

Now, to add insult to injury, I don’t even have an optical drive on this machine. I could buy one I suppose, but I rarely use CDs any more.

And so we come full circle.

Regardless, bashburn is one of a handful of CD/DVD writing options at the console. For some reason, it seems the majority of burning tools come in graphical form.

Of course, as you probably know, 99 percent of those GUIs are just sending instructions to the command line. But we’ve probably talked about that before. …

If this works for you, leave a note. I’d be curious to get your impression of it.