[Techtalk] recording music CDs

Alvin Goats agoats at compuserve.com
Thu Feb 26 23:03:33 EST 2004


> What's the best format for recording music CDs to play on regular ole audio CD 
> players, like in the car? From what I've read, it seems there are three
> options: .wav files, .cdr, and some kind of raw cd-da format.  What say ye? I 
> want to stick with the usual command-line programs, like cdrecord, cdrdao, 
> cdda2wav, sox, etc.


I've  been doing this for some time, including LP's and 45's to CD, old
cassettes to CD and mp3's to CD. 

cdrecrod wants .wav files in a proper 44100 format, but not all wav
files are in that format.

sox will convert most sound files to something else, as well as changing
formats to a 44100 wav file, it just won't do mp3's directly.

Records and tapes give you a long, huge file or is laborious to sit and
split, gramofile will do that for you for the most part. 

Records and tapes have noise, but can be cleaned up with gwc (gnome wave
cleaner).

So, digging into my little wizard's journal...

mp3's to wav:

mpg123 -b 10000 -s filename.mp3 | sox -t raw -r 44100 -s -w -c 2 -
filename.wav

Make SURE you get that blank, dash, blank before filename.wav!

====================

Other sounds to wav:

sox filename.au filename.cdr
sox filename.cdr filename.wav

The first line is to convert a sound file to a defaulted stereo, 44100
sample size corrected file for CD's. It is a raw format, but cdrecord
doesn't like it. The second line converts the .cdr to .wav that cdrecord
does like. 

This is also the technique to convert improper wav's to the right
format. You'll find out that you don't have the right wav format for
cdrecord as it will complain BEFORE ever trying to burn a CD and stop.

sox filename.wav filename.cdr
rm filename.wav
sox filename.cdr filename.wav

=============

Some things won't let you get at the sound portion very easy. You need:
vsound. This is a program that inserts itself between the audio out of a
player and will pipe to the speakers as well as to a file. Some examples
are: 

vsound -d -f filename.wav realplay URL/file.rm
vsound -d -f filename.wav xanim file.mov
vsound -d -f filename.wav mplayer file.mpg
vousnd -d -f filename.wav mpg123 file.mp3
 
Use sox to get the wav in the right format if necessary (you sometimes
have to). vsound is command line, but some of the players aren't. You
need to be in X for the players that will need it.

===========

I record my Vinyl to cassette tape and then use grecord to record to a
humongous wav file on my PC. I found grecord to be more convenient for
me, it is an X application. 

Once I have the file, I use gramofile to split the music up into CD
tracks. It looks for "quiet" portions of the sound, which is typically
the space between music tracks on an LP. Follow their documentation,
it's pretty good. If you have trouble, contact me.

Some music isn't so easy to split: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the
Moon.... continuous sound with no ID for track start/stop. Use gramofile
to try to find a "track", it creates an ascii text file you can edit
which has when music starts and stops. You may have only one "track",
but you can manually add the other track data yourself. kde and others
have wav players that will give you the "time" for the sound you are
hearing, just note the time and edit the text file with the appropriate
track number, start time and stop time.

Re-run the splitting portion of gramofile again and it will create the
seperate sound tracks from a continuous sound LP or tape. gramofile is
command line.

+++++++++++++

Noise is a nuisance! Pops, clicks, hiss, rumble... annoying. gwc is a
wav file sound cleaner that will remove the pops, clicks and crackle
from Vinyl recordings. Follow their recommendations, you'll do fine. It
also has a sound sampler that you use to select a "silent" portion of
your sound (music lead in or trailer). This can then be fed back in to
the sound file to remove similar noise, particulary Vinyl record rumble
and tape hiss. 

I've recovered some LP's to a level that is somewhere between ADD and
AAD CD music disks. Most only make it to AAD quality, but... you have
music on CD that may never be put on CD's! gwc is an X application only.

==============

I use cdrecord to burn a music CD. To be certain that I get the music to
burn and not have to retype anything, always use -pad in the command.
This will pad zero's to music that doesn't quite fill the proper music
disc sector size. I forget what the sector size is, and don't really
care. ;D

Using my MMC compatable EIDE burner on SCSI ID 1,0,0:

cdrecord -v -eject -pad dev=1,0,0 driver=mmc_cdr *.wav

It will record the music in sorted order (increasing numbers then
alphabetic capitals and then alphabetic lower case). You can set the
order yourself by copying the music you want to a directory and renaming
the files to 01.wav, 02.wav, 03.wav... 

===============

Music CD's have a maximum of 99 songs per disk. Typically, you can get
about 22 songs per disk. Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor is about
100Meg, so you'll have fewer music tracks; childrens songs run anywhere
from 5Meg to 30Meg, so you'll have more tracks per disk. 

Does this help?

Alvin


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