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. 😕

mp3burn: Straight to video — I mean, audio

If you think I’m nervous about reaching way back to 2001 for something like mp3burn, you needn’t worry.

One thing you can say about Debian, it does a good job preserving its multitude of components.

Of course, that’s Linux Mint 16, which is only a distant cousin to Debian, but mp3burn works well from the repos there. I didn’t find it in Arch. 😯 Amazing, I know.

I’ll admit I didn’t actually burn a CD though; I’m low on CDs right now. 😕 But not bad for a program with an 0.1 version dated 2001. It seems to have aged well.

mp3burn’s claim to fame is that it doesn’t spill decoded mp3s to disk, which saves space in the conversion process.

Remembering back to 2001, I can see why mp3burn would have won a few converts. Disk space was a little tighter 12 years ago, and filling a disk while writing a CD was a danger.

Regardless, mp3burn still works, even if disk space isn’t a worry these days.

Oh, and I know you thought mp3wrap would round out all the mp3* programs. Not by a long shot. 😈