I’m having an issue trying to burn a music CD for use in my (very old, I know I know) car. I’m running FedoraKDE (40) and Brasero, a Liteon brand external optical DVDRW drive, CD-R (TDK brand), and a Framework 16.
The issue I’m having seems to be that the blank disks(maybe?) aren’t recognized automatically by Fedora, when I pop a full commercially released CD in it’ll play/rip, but with a blank disk nothing happens, and I don’t know where to “save” the “image” of this album I’m creating in Brasero to get it on the disk.
Someone on a random linux forum told some other guy to run cdrecord -checkdrive which says my drive is at /dev/sr0 with a blank disk, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Do I choose sr0 as the place to save it? It says “something something overwrite” when I try which makes me wary, it seems it wants to overwrite “sr0” itself and either bork my drive or install, but maybe?
I’m positive it’s just something simple I’m missing, any help would be greatly appreciated and I can answer questions and run commands if needed (but I don’t actually have WIFI rn, so I’ll have to have the package for said command already.)
Thanks in advance.
The way I do it is I rip the cd I have to FLAC or MP3, then I mix the songs I want and burn it to a “music CD”. You do not want to make a data cd as computers usually try to burn by default.
I can rip em no problem. I “ripped” this one and am totally “just making a backup.” Where I got 14 audio files is of little consequence, I would like to put those audio files on a blank disk which I have purchased.
The problem is I do not know how to get the files from brasero to the disk. They’re all in brasero, the only options I have are “name” (we’ll call it Keasby Nights), and a dropdown menu with “image file” as the only option, and a button labeled “burn.” So naturally, you click “burn” right? Ok, well now it pops up with a file picker on /home/. What now?
I did a bit of googling and it seems like “Brasero” had widespread popularity. I found this:https://documentation.suse.com/sles/12-SP5/html/SLES-all/cha-gnome-burn.html, but can’t test it because I haven’t had a disk drive in at least a decade. Since this is forum meant for noobs, please let me know if you need guidance on how to install Brasero and I would be happy to help. From there, it has a GUI and should be quite familiar to anyone who used Winamp, itunes, or windows media player back in the day.
Thank you for your assistance. The issue isn’t “how to install brasero” however.
As per the documentation, it says
1. Select Project › New Project › New Audio Project. 2. Drag and drop the individual audio tracks to the project directory. The audio data must be in WAV or Ogg Vorbis format. Determine the sequence of the tracks by moving them up or down in the project directory. 3. Click Burn. A dialog opens. 4. Specify a drive to write to. 5. Click Properties to adjust burning speed and other preferences. When burning audio CDs, choose a lower burning speed to reduce the risk of burn errors. 6. Click Burn.My issue is during
4.The dialog pops up just as you’d expect. Where do I choose to save the file? It defaults to being open on /home/, however I think if I save it there, the files will not be on my disk, they’ll be in my home dir. Where is the disk?Aha! I understand now. So, on Linux, everything is a file. Even Disk Drives, CDs, flash drives, etc. I think this may be the root of your confusion. Instead of new drive D:// popping up somewhat parallel to your C:// file system (as it would in Windows), it shows up inside your existing file system.
You were on the right path before. The cdrecord command you ran seems to have correctly told you the location of the CD in your file system (/dev/sr0) . I imagine this changes with distro and hardware, but I’m not sure because my CD burning days predate my Linux days. If you want to make sure that this is indeed the correct place to save the file, then run the command again with the CD removed. If it disappears, then you’ve got it.
The closest thing I’ve done is install raspberry OS to a flash drive, which often shows up as /dev/sd0, so it seems like you were very much on the right track. The /dev folder means “device”, so most hardware peripherals will have some kind of presence here.
Yes that is indeed what I seek, thank you!
Well so it seems it is on /dev/sr0, because I have found some help on burning the disk through CLI with cdrecord itself, and sox to convert the files to .cdr format. The disk is now “burning” (well, it sounds like it! We’ll see if it plays here shortly), but I would like to find out how to use brasero to do it.
For now though I can write a script to convert all the files in a given dir to .cdr and then auto burn them to the disk if this works though which ain’t too shabby.
It looks like Brasero would handle all of that kind of Media Management stuff for you, so try it out before you reinvent the wheel.
Well that’s the thing, I still haven’t figured out how to make brasero actually do anything, but I have already written and tested my first version of my script and it’s burning my second disk now. On this test I’ve figured out another line I need to add to improve it (and make it clean up the .cdr files after itself.) So, unless I can find someone with better instructions on brasero than “just do it” it seems I’m stuck with reinvention.
Incidentally, is it better for me to call sudo inside the script for
cdrecord -vor should I not use it inside and instead runsudo myscriptfor the whole thing?I think Ideally you should be able to run it as you instead of root or sudo. I’m assuming you are needing sudo since you don’t have access to the burner as your user.
Do an “ls -lah” on your cd burner. I think you said it was /dev/sr0 so “ls -lah /dev/sr0” and see if it is owned by root:root or hopefully root:disk or something like that. The format is “user:group” so I’m hoping it is owned by a group that you can simply add your user to.
If it is owned by another group, you can just run “sudo usermod -aG disk user” replace disk with the group that shows on the ls command and user with your user.
If that burner is owned by root:root, there is a way to change that. But that gets very complicated. And I’m not sure its worth the effort for you unless you are wanting to learn more. Point 4.3 here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Udev
In which case to directly answer your question, I’d personally prefer to sudo the script instead of adding sudo in the script. But at the end of the day, I don’t think it matters too much for this specific use case.
Looks like root, I think. It says
brw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 11, 0 Aug 18 14:13 /dev/sr0no “:” though oddly, so maybe I can run
sudo usermod -aG cdrom $USER?Edit: looks like it throws the same error as not sudoing, wodim no write mode specified blah blah. It did add me to the cdrom group though. Although now it won’t work with sudo, how do I remove myself from the cdrom group?
Edit again: Wait, I got it working with another disk, the one I was just trying may have been too big to fit on the disk but throwing the same error as when I didn’t use sudo. Burning this one with sudo, will test again without when it finishes. Thankfully I have a stack of these disks lol I can do this all day.
Ok, still need sudo. Without sudo it just exits without writing to the disk. I guess what I thought was warnings is just standard incomprehensible readout, but yeah without sudo (or if the files are too big for the disk) it just exits and finishes out my script removing the .cdr files.
hey, man. I’m sorry you felt like I was saying “just do it”. I’d be happy to help more, but I don’t have a CD ROM to test with. I just assumed the GUI would be more self explanatory. Like I said above, I’ve never had to burn a CD on Linux. Please remember that the Linux community is made of volunteers. Getting frustrated at them doesn’t really make them want to help, especially since I literally cannot help anymore than I have without a CD rom in my hands. If you want to ship one to me, I’d be happy to figure out Brasero and walk you through it. Since that is clearly unreasonable, remember that these forums are populated by well-intentioned people doing their best.
I mean it’s not your fault, that’s what the documentation for brasero says. It doesn’t tell me how to “select where to save it” or whatever their exact verbiage is however, and the hard part is even getting people to understand what my issue is. You may not have been able to answer my main question but you helped me work around it, sorta, and for that I am grateful. I just wish the documentation and every comment helping didn’t just say “download brasero” (which I clearly have already done as per my question) or “use this link which says ‘brasero: just do it.’”
Tbf I’m sure most people don’t bother to try and solve things themselves before posting, but I’ve already seen the brasero instructions that were linked because I did, and it still doesn’t tell me what I need to select to get the files on the disk, it just tells me that I need to select something. Again I think selecting /dev/sr0 will replace and overwrite sr0 as per the warning, so I do not think it is the correct answer, and so far nobody has given any alternatives as to what the answer might be, instead offering suggestions on how to download brasero or that darn link again.
And as to reinventing the wheel:
Now I’m trying to get my script to run
cdrecord -checkdriveand pipe that answer into my script, the damn thing is now on /dev/sr1!
Also, check out this article:
https://dev.to/softwaresennin/linux-directory-structure-simplified-a-comprehensive-guide-3012
It goes over basic folder structure for Linux so that you have a rough idea where something like C://Users/User/Program Files lives in it’s equivalent form on Linux.
Thanks this is super helpful! I’ll be saving this one to pdf for future reference too!
Maybe try k3b, a CD burning program by the KDE project instead. It always worked well for me.
I’ll have to get to an internet connection, which coincidentally I’ll be doing in a few minutes while I take a break from this and go to a friend’s house. I’ll download it while I’m there, thanks!
How are you replying? Lol.
Phone has internet, house does not. Shocking I know but most people are paying for 2 internet connections, phone and house, while at the moment I’m only paying for one (phone) until I get a router and figure out this whole openwrt business. I’m just being lazy on it.
I can hotspot but I’m severely limited (like 5gb iirc, dogshit) and am only using that for emergencies atm, which installing k3b would count except I am already at a friends house and have it installed, so I could just do that instead. But now I’m drinking beer, and when I get home I’ll probably eat, sleep, wake up and go to work, and then try out k3b. Or I’ll try it tonight when I get home, but probably not lol. C’est la vie!
Yes, I guessed. I was just being flippant. Enjoy the buddy times. Make sure you share one of your beers for the free internet they are paying for.
I definitely recommend trouble shooting and trying when you get home. Slightly buzzed always goes well for me. Or, I completely miss something blaringly obvious, like plugging something in. One or the other.
If youre driving to work, I’d say it does count as an emergency! But I’m glad you could conserve your data.
Me too! Lol. He’s actually not paying for it either, his brother is, but I did nonetheless lol, thanks dad (or mom or gender neutral parental unit, whatever sarcastic parent you identify with, I’m inclusive.)
It’s definitely plugged in, it works with CLI cdrecord. I just would like to find a GUI to match.
Naw I’ll be working tomorrow before working on my computer stuff I mean. Drinking now, no working!
yeah, burning and saving is probably not the same. /dev/sr0 is just a so called device node. it is a special file with two numbers that are an interface to control the drive. if this file gets borked (eg. replaced by a disk image) you can recreate it using the numbers with mknod, or likely udev or something will recreate it at boot when all the hardware is detected, which triggers events to create them.
i remember vaguely there used to be links to the proper device nodes being created, usually called /dev/cdrw or /dev/cdrom maybe check for those, preferably rw and maybe yours is dvdrw or so.
good luck
I do see what appears to be a /dev/cdrom, but if I click it, it says “a file named cdrom already exists. Do you want to replace it? The file already exists in dev. Replacing it will overwrite it’s contents.” Just like it says with /dev/sr0. That can’t be right. It’s trying to save the image of this audio cd as “cdrom” under /dev/. Am I supposed to do /dev/cdrom/keasbynights or something?
no. no. that’s correct. Linux is warning you that you’re about to burn to the disk which will overwrite any files that are there (rewritable CD Roms are a thing and Linux doesn’t necessarily know what kind it is). It’s just warning you that in either case, you’re writing to the disk.
It’s also no uncommon to have two locations. for example, on my Ubuntu install, I have several /dev/sdX (replace X with a sequential number). One for each physical disc. Those also show up in a folder called /mnt/media but I’m not 100% why. There’s probably some subtle difference that exists for security reasons that’s documented… somewhere.
Ah ok, that may be the ticket then, but it makes me really nervous to brick the drive itself or “sr1” itself. There used to be an /dev/cdrom but that is gone now.
Another user says that you’re not going to brick the drive and that anything you do will probably be fixed by a reboot. If you want to be sure you’re not writing to the main file system drive, the best method is to physically disconnect the device to see that the dev/srX disappears when you do so. At least, that’s the method I’ve always used when burning SD cards for a raspberry pi.
I’ll give it a shot when I’m back at it, thanks! I don’t mean bricking my ssd though I mean bricking the liteon optical drive.
Look at the top level comment by the user, lurch. If I’m understating him correctly, a reboot should fix it in case that happens. Generally you need to run the
ddcommand to brick stuff in the way you’re imagining. It’s short for either disk duplicator or disk destroyer (if you fuck up). I suspect thecdrecordutility would prevent you from doing anything too stupid on accident.The dd command is exactly what scares me about it haha, I’ve bricked adapters before!
Cdrecord is going just fine with the command I’m using but the GUI for brasero is what is still confusing me. I got k3b though so once I’m back at that disk drive (likely tomorrow) I’ll give that a shot, and try to just say “yes” to that overwrite of sr0 (or sr1 or whatever it is at the time) on brasero.
You really should try k3b. Brasero was always kind of a joke by comparison in my experience. For example, k3b easily let’s you run diagnostics on your dependencies, so you can check that they are present and correct.
Just got it downloaded! I’ll give it a shot (probably tomorrow evening)! Thanks!
Any luck? Was just reading through the thread and curious if k3b is the way to go?
No, it still wouldn’t recognize my external drive and all the suggestions to try for my script didn’t work. I’m still using the somewhat janky but working script I wrote around cdrecord originally.
