Making audio CDs en mass - Linux based solutions?

My mom's sings and gives away cds to people. Invariably it falls to me to have to burn cds for her, and burning 50-100 cds on a single drive is a pain. I DO have a handful of cd burners and a slightly geriatric old PIII 450. This is what i want to be able to do - either point an application at a folder of WAV or MP3s, say how many copies i need on CLI (since then i can SSH into the system and use it headless) feed 2 or more CD burners cds until its done, OR pop in a single CD into a master drive and have its contents duplicated to 2 or more burners. I'd rather have it running on linux, be command line based, and be as little work as possible - almost automatic short of telling it how many copies i want would be ideal.

I'm sure i'll have people wondering about legality - My mom sings her own music, and its classical, and older than copyright law, so, that's a non issue. I just want a way to make this chore a little easier, short of telling my mom to do it herself.

Journeyman Geek

Posted 2011-01-14T11:14:19.880

Reputation: 119 122

in which country do you live? – akira – 2011-01-14T11:44:36.270

singapore. But this is more a technical than a buying question, so that's irrelevant ;) – Journeyman Geek – 2011-01-14T12:57:06.867

well, i consider 'wasting a lot of time' vs 'find a close-by business who burns 50-100 audio cds for almost nothing' relevant... :) – akira – 2011-01-14T13:08:54.837

I'd rather get someone else to do it. However my mom insists we do it ourselves out of some sense of false economy. Of course, it takes me 2-3 days to get everything done, which she ignores. NOT to mention buying questions are OT, and I have some ideas on where to hunt down a local vendor. – Journeyman Geek – 2011-01-15T07:51:42.630

Answers

to detect dev parameters for your burners - first run:

cdrecord -scanbus

then you can create shell script for .wav files

cdrecord dev=,0,0 gracetime=2 fs=4096k -v -useinfo -dao speed=12 -eject -pad -text -audio /path_to_wav_files/*

or for .mp3 files

for I in *.mp3
do
   mpg123 --cdr - "$I" | cdrecord -audio -pad -nofix -
done
cdrecord -fix

Also:

cdcontrol - parallel burner that allow you to write to one or more CD-Writers at once
cwcdr, burn, cdw - console burning software
mp3cd - Burns normalized audio CDs from lists of MP3s/WAVs/OGGs/FLACs

mp3cd -d /dev/scd0 *mp3

jet

Posted 2011-01-14T11:14:19.880

Reputation: 2 675

Very good, to the point answer. I look forward to testing this out :) – Journeyman Geek – 2011-01-15T00:19:01.513

The easiest would be to buy some sort of CD/DVD duplicator. You burn one master copy and then it makes copies of that.

They come in a wide variety of quality and prices. Here are a few examples

Nifle

Posted 2011-01-14T11:14:19.880

Reputation: 31 337

I'll need to use available hardware. Else, this would be the option i'd wish i could take. – Journeyman Geek – 2011-01-14T12:56:38.067

Outsourcing like here http://www.dupeshop.com/pricing/duplication-pricing.htm .

100 CD's ~ 140$. You have to buy the CD's anyway, maybe print for them a label and spend also some hours while you can do better things.

PeterMmm

Posted 2011-01-14T11:14:19.880

Reputation: 471

oh, i know i could be. Problem is my mom refuses to outsource. OR get a duplicator. Building one out of spares is the only option available to me, short of doing it the old fashioned way – Journeyman Geek – 2011-01-14T12:56:12.997

2your mom does not refuse to outsource since she outsourced the problem to YOU. the concept of outsourcing is quite familiar to your mum :) – akira – 2011-01-14T13:09:58.470