Can/How to burn a .flac to an audio cd

Question

This is a two part question.

Can I burn .flac to audio cds?

this might seem silly, but I was an early adopter of mp3 players. Think several years before Ipods. I never really had the need to burn too many cds. My girlfriend, however, keeps asking for cds for her cars cd player. I do have a huge collection. Most of which from artists who have a live recording policy. So sorry, no help on illegal downloads from me. So, can I give her great quality music, or will I need to convert these to mp3s? If this is the latter, what format might one suggest? Google seems to indicate that it is indeed possible.

How do I burn these files from the command line?

I am probably going to burn straight from my file-sever, which is headless machine (10.4)? I do have some .cue files, but ironically they seem to point to .wav files, where the files in question are .flac files. Am I able to utilize these .cue files?

Solution 1

Rant:

I would suggest you convert FLAC files to MP3 instead making AudioCD. Why?

1. You can't possibly notice difference between lame -V 5 (or even lower) and original source listening in a car
2. You'll save yourself time in the process and save $ on plastic, as space needed would be ~10 times reduced this way, plus you wont need to browse for CDs to find single album ;)

Procedure:

1. Convert FLACs to MP3 with lame (lame recommends -V2, but in your case I'd go with -V5):

   flac -d -c track.flac | lame -V 5 - track.mp3

   example for processing all FLAC files in current folder:

   for f in *.flac ; do flac -d -c "$f" | lame -V 5 - "${f%.*}.mp3" ; done

2. Convert MP3 folder structure to Joliet folder structure ISO image
   After you have converted FLAC files to MP3 arange MP3s in folder structure (i.e. /artist/album/track) than make ISO image like this:

   mkisofs -J -o /tmp/MP3-CD.iso /path to root of MP3 folder structure/

   Note: you can't go above 700MB, check for space first

3. Burn ISO image

   wodim dev=/dev/sg1 -dao speed=8 -eject /tmp/MP3-CD.iso

   Note: Use wodim --devices to check for your device. dev=/dev/sg1 is valid for my system

Voila

Solution 2

In a directory that contains the .flac files you want to burn and nothing else:

for x in *.flac ; do flac -d "$x" ; done
wodim dev=/dev/cdrw -v -sao -useinfo -text -audio -pad driveropts=audiomaster *.wav
/bin/rm *.wav

(Assuming the location of your optical drive is /dev/cdrw.)

Solution 3

For those that don't need to have a command line option, K3b and Brasero are supposed to be able to do it, however I could not make the latter work on my 12.04 64 bit machine, but it's working fine with K3b.

For this to work you need to:

• have a .cue file for your image, make one manually if you don't
• enable the K3b FLAC Decoder plugin
• install the FLAC++ library (sudo apt-get install libflac++6)

See also the K3b requirements page.

Comments

[zetah]

How does your CUE sheet look like?

[zetah]

You can make data CD with MP3s (as FLACs probably wont play on any car CD player) or you can convert FLAC to WAV and create AudioCD. Choice is yours

[Francesco]

1. Cue sheet looks like every other proper cue sheet i've ever seen. Less the .wav in place of .flac. 2. How would I accomplish this from the command line?

[zetah]

I was asking because it was not clear to me if CUE sheet was referencing one "image" WAV file or separate files. However I'll provide you solution in couple of minutes/hours which I think would be best for your scenario.

[Francesco]

ah, I see. its not a single file/img to such a .bin/.cue but instead I have multiple .flac files and the .cue sheet reads as multiple wav files. I have been able to convert to .wav simply by flac -d *.flac, but now I am searching for a command line alternative to write the disc. I did find a solution but it required me finding my write offset of my drive. I was going to research more after work. Thanks

[Francesco]

thanks, although your rant is wasted. While I may not be able to empirically argue point one, point two is mute. Space is hardly an issue. its not hard to do rm *wav, but the money on plastic is not a problem either due to my preference to make exact copies of some CDs, I do accept your notion on being able to add more tracks, but it does not apply in my case.... Also any thoughts on burning from the .cue's I have laying around. Anyway +1, I am going to leave this open a few days before accepting an answer. Thanks.

[zetah]

Sorry to read your comment, but you have your preferences. I won't be able to provide you walk through for making AudioCDs with your CUE sheets, because of my already posted answer. Look for cdrdao package, and accompanied documentation

[Francesco]

well, I still didn't find precisely what I'm after, but I appreciate the help. Looking at cdrdao it looks rather simple, but i keep recieving the error Pregap Out of Range. I feel this may be an error with the .cue file, but its hard to understand. Thanks.

[zetah]

Something must be wrong with your CUE sheet(s) and there are many ways for it. I guess cue2toc will report same error. You could try cdrtools (cdrecord) as alternative, or just convert files to WAV and make AudioCD without CUE sheet

[Eric Carvalho]

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.

[yelly]

The last two points were unnecessary for me. I had a .cue file available. I installed the K3b and I was able to burn .cue file without changing any option - right out of the box.

[Jeff Puckett]

Brasero works just fine for me on 14.04