Burn (fka GSburn.app) is a GNUstep based CD burning program. It serves as front-end for Joerg Schilling's cdrtools (cdrecord and mkisofs), cdrdao, and cdparanoia. You will no longer need to remember ugly command line parameters for cdrecord or write shell scripts (I know, I know. The purists among us decline the usage of any graphical tool. But as a purist you didn't download this application in the first place and thus won't read this anyway ;-). With Burn you compile your CD by point-and-click operation and save your projects for later reuse. Burn will hide as many settings as possible from you, thus making it very easy and user-friendly to create your own CDs.
Burn has now reached version 0.7.0.
Burn is developped and tested on a x86 PC running GNU/Linux. Being a GNUstep application, it may be portable to other platforms where GNUstep is available (and the external tools, of course).
Before you install Burn, you must make sure that the following software is installed on your system. Otherwise you might not even be able to compile Burn.
Of course, Burn needs a GNUstep (www.gnustep.org) environment to run. It has been developed and tested in the following environment:
gnustep-make 1.23 gnustep-base 1.23 gnustep-gui 0.21 gnustep-back 0.21
Burn will most probably not run with older versions of GNUstep, in particular -gui.
For adding files and directories you will need an appropriate "file manager" being able to communicate with Burn via DnD. Currently, there is only GWorkspace.app. Any version from on 0.6.0 should do. Install GWorkspace.app according to its instructions.
You might also need CDPlayer to use Burn. This is because Burn uses the AudioCD.bundle included in CDPlayer to read an audio CD's TOC. Burn now also relies on CDPlayer for adding audio CD tracks to a CD description either via DnD or using the new services. CDPlayer can be downloaded at:
https://github.com/schik/cdplayer
Unpack the tar ball and do:
make make install
As mentioned above, Burn uses several external tools to actually accomplish the tasks of ripping audio CDs or burning CDs. These must be installed from other sources as they are not part of Burn.
The cdrtools package contains the programs cdrecord, mkiofs and cdparanoia. They are supported by the respective bundles CDrecord.burntool, MkIsoFs.burntool and CDparanoia.burntool. Burn 0.7 has been tested with the following versions (Note, that other versions may work, too, but were not tested.):
cdrecord (www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling/cdrecord.html) Cdrecord-ProDVD-ProBD-Clone 3.00
mkisofs (www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling/cdrecord.html) 3.00
cdparanoia III rel. 10.2. (www.xiph.org/paranoia)
It is stringly recommended to use the original programs from the cdrtools suite. On the one hand, Burn is largely tested with these and on the other, the clones do often not work reliably (see below). Note, that most Linux distros today come with the cdrkit instead, thus you will have to build and install cdrtools manually.
cdrkit is a replacement for the cdrtools package. The programs in the package are called wodim and genisoimage. cdrecord and mkisofs are symbolic links to these programs! cdrkit (especially wodim) uses slightly different command line arguments. In particular, media detection does not work reliably, if at all. Usually, it is necessary to adapt /etc/wodim.conf or to create particular symlinks to /dev/sr0 (e.g. /dev/cdrw or /dev/scd0) to make wodim detect the drive. Once the drive is detected by wodim, the program seems to work reasonably well. wodim and genisoimage can be used with the bundles CDrecord and MkIsoFs. If you want to use cdrkit (wodim), open the settings dialog and set the program path accordingly. You have to turn on the compatibility mode, too, to run wodim with correct parameters.
There exists another program that claims to be compatible to cdrecord, cdrskin. I have not tested cdrskin thoroughfully, but it seems as if it is a suitable drop-in replacement for the original cdrecord program. At least it understands the same parameters and prints the same output. Thus, it can be used with the CDrecord bundle. As it turned out, cdrskin does not burn usable audio CDs. The program claimed that the WAV files were of no suitable format, but burned them anyway. The output was an audio CD with garbage on it. From various sources on the Internet, I conclude, that cdrskin has issues with the headers of WAV and AU files, thus seems unsuitable for that purpose. If you want to use it, open the settings dialog and set the program path accordingly. You do not have to turn on the compatibility mode.
An alternative writing backend is cdrdao. cdrecord may be replaced by this program. Note, that cdrdao may lack some of cdrecord's features. Burn 0.7 has been tested with the version 1.2.2 of cdrdao (Note, that other versions may work, too, but were not tested.).
Since version 0.7.0, Burn uses ffmpeg or avconv to convert audio files to wav files. wav files are needed as an intermediate step if you want to create an audio CD. Burn has been tested with version 9.18 of avconv.
Before you install Burn you should uninstall any old version of GSburn.app. This is because Burn is the replacement for GSburn.app. They may coexist, but you won't need GSburn.app anymore. You must also uninstall any older version of Burn. This is due to the fact that some APIs for the backend bundles have changed and are no longer compatible. Older versions of the bundles might be loaded, but will lead to erroneous behaviour.
After installing the above stuff simply do
tar xzf burn-xxx.tar.gz cd burn-xxx make make install
This will install everything needed to run Burn except the external tools (see above).
If you want the documentation to be created, call
make doc=yes.
This will create one additional directory, DeveloperDoc, containing documentation on the classes, protocols, functions and so on. However, this feature is far from being finished, yet.
Howto what? Burn is designed to be simple, easy to use and intuitive ;-) Seriously, check the online help for further assistance.
You use Burn at your own risk. I cannot be held responsible for any damage to your hardware, for spoiled raw media or for loss of data.
For bug reports or feature requests contact the author:
Andreas Schik andreas@schik.de
Burn can be found at https://github.com/schik/burn