Thursday, October 27, 2011

Linux and CD/DVD burning.

Well, I'm disappointed. Agreed that CD/DVDs or any kind of optical media is a dying game, but it's also critical for professional/home media production.


We do have a lot of multimedia tools which work well, but what we don't have is a good CD/DVD burner, when it co
mes to graphical burners, things boil down to - 
K3b -- the most preferred and the only one.
xfburn -- the second choice, if k3b doesn't work.
Brasero -- Most unreliable and most buggy.
xcdroast -- seriously, I never got this to work
Nero


The backends of all the apps except Nero boils down to - 


cdrkit/cdrtools
libburn/cdrskin


Everything else is deprecated.


I have someone who has the work of converting very old cassette and LPs to ACDs (i.e. he has to burn the recorded tracks to CDs).


A few months ago Nero stopped working after an upgrade, ironically it could not add audio files (wav) to make ACD, everything else worked fine. 
So it was rejected and the fallback was k3b, which a few months later (again after an upgrade) hit a bug where adding audio tracks randomly causes segmentation fault, this is a still a Debian bug.
Next fallback was xfburn -- but it didn't add any gap between tracks of the burnt disk.


Finally Brasero -- the most unreliable (don't ask why) came to the rescue, it did not segfault and was capable to adding gaps between tracks but I think this'll also end up in bugs some day or the other.


Not to mention, I had spend days to figure out the issue with CD/DVD burning on Linux a year ago and fixing strange problem with various hardware, specially pioneer drives and external devices (popular now). Things complicate more with fabulous cdrkit bugs and the dramatic cdrkit-cdrtools clash -- a licence issue, something which no one except Debian devs care about. The ultimate solution that I see is libburn and it's client cdrskin -- they never gave any problem on any hardware.


But cdrskin waits for k3b to add support, till this we only have xfburn. :(

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