Andreas Eckleder
Oct 21st 2000
Following the Unix concept, Gnometoaster heavily relies on already available solutions to fulfill it's task rather than re-implementing all the various functions required for CD recording. As a result of that, however, you'll need to have a few additional programs and packages installed on your system in order to successfully record a CD-R with Gnometoaster.
Because of the history of CD Writers, all recorders on the market today are using a SCSI command set to communicate with the operating system and the recording software. This is how it came: CD Writers, because of their nature as write-once devices, need a continuous data stream when burning a CDR medium. If the transfer rate drops below a certain level only once in a recoding session, the blank you've been recording is usually lost. With initial medium prices at about $30, it made no sense to even risk this to happen. The SCSI transport standard, in contrast to IDE/ATAPI, has long been known to yield both high transfer rates at low CPU time consumption and high reliability because SCSI devices are independent to other SCSI devices on their bus. So SCSI was chosen to be the bus system for the first CD Writers on the market. However, when the first ATAPI cd recorders hit the low-cost market, nobody wanted to change the way the drives were being accessed at software level because this would have required manufacturers to design a new drive chipset from scratch, let alone the effort to reimplement all the driver infrastructure present already at the software side. So they just designed an additional protocol layer wrapping the scsi commands into ATAPI commands for the transfer over the IDE bus. So all a recording software wanting to support ATAPI writers has to do is wrapping the inital SCSI commands into the ATAPI protocol and sending them to the cd writer over the IDE bus. This process is usually performed by a special DLL coming the the recording Software in Windows(tm) environments because there's no support by the operating system. Linux, however, comes with a complete SCSI over ATAPI emulator kernel driver. All you have to do to make your IDE recorder work with any linux cd recording software out there is to configure your linux kernel to make use of the idescsi device driver. How to do this is highly depending on your system configuration and esp. the distribution you're using. Linux Mandrake for example is configuring the idescsi driver automatically if it detects a cd writer during installation. If you're using a self-compiled kernel,however,you'll have to either compile idescsi support directly into the kernel, in which case all your ATAPI cdrom drives will appear to be SCSI drives from now on or compile idescsi as a module in which case you'll have to tell the linux kernel with a parameter handed down to the kernel by LILO at startup which drives you want to use idescsi with.
If you have a plain SCSI writer all you have to do is to load the hardware driver necessary to access your scsi card. In either case you'll also need the SCSI generic kernel module which makes it possible to send SCSI commands to individual SCSI drives on the bus directly.
Recording CDRs puts a rather high load on your system's components. Although most state of the art systems should easily be capable of recording CDR media perfectly well the hardware requirements for cd recording should not be underestimated as your cd recorder needs a continuous stream of data with interruptions only as small as can easily be handled by the onboard buffer provided by your recorder which is usually about 512kb to 2048kb which, depending on the recording speed, takes less than a second to exceed.
For the graphical user interface of Gnometoaster and cdrecord's internal data buffer you'll need about 16MB of system RAM to record a CDR. In fact, this amount of memory is not too generous as your X server loves eating RAM as well.
Your CPU should at least be a Pentium class 90Mhz CPU, 200Mhz and more are required to safely record .mp3 files on the fly5.
If your CPU or the medium your data are coming from is not fast enough to provide the content you want to store on a cd in realtime, Gnometoaster can cache data on your harddrive. To make this possible, you need at least 700MB of free harddrive space.
Gnometoaster is available in a number of different offerings from The Gnometoaster Homepage http://gnometoaster.rulez.org:
To install Gnometoaster from sourcecode,your computer needs to have all the development tools necessary to create Gtk+/Gnome Applications installed. Most importantly, this is the GNU C Compiler of a compatible compiler capable of producing ELF executables. You need the kernel header files as well as all header files of X,Gtk+ and glib. If your system fulfills those requirements, you can now start the installation procedure as follows:
This depends on the distribution you're using. The easiest way to find out how to build a gnometoaster source package on your system is to look it up in your distribution's documentation.
This is the most simple way of installing Gnometoaster. You just have to use your distribution's package manager to install the Gnometoaster package. On a Debian box,you'd type dpkg -i gtoaster-xxxx.deb or apt-get install gtoaster on a Debian potato system to install the most current version of Gnometoaster directly over the internet. RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE Users should type rpm -i gtoaster-xxxx.xxx.rpm. If Gnometoaster came with your distribution as is the case with Linux Mandrake and Debian, you can also use your distribution's package selection tool to install Gnometoaster.
YOU SHOULD READ THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY TO MAKE SURE THAT THE FIRST CD YOU'RE RECORDING DOESN'T BECOME A COASTER. BESIDES, YOU'RE GOING TO LEARN QUITE A FEW IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT THE WAY GNOMETOASTER WORKS.
Start Gnometoaster from the account you're planning to run it in the future by typing gtoaster on an X Terminal. In most cases this will be the root account unless you set the cdrecord executable +suid root (please be aware that this is opening a giant security hole on your system as everyone can use cdrecord to create cds from any files on your system. See FAQ section for a few ideas on how to make your cd writer accessible to normal users).Now enter Gnometoaster's Preferences window by choosing Edit/Preferences or clicking the toolbar icon. We'll now step through all the panes of the preferences notebook and change the things that need to be changed.
The first thing we need to have a look at here is the ``Temporary Files'' entry. Please let this entry point to a directory with enough space available to eventually hold about 700MB of data. Gnometoaster will create it's temporary files there, especially any track images of tracks that have been precached. Please make sure the directory is writable.
The ``Precache datatracks'' option determines wether Gnometoaster should create an image on your harddrive when copying a datatrack from one cd to another. You should select this option if the CDROM you want to copy contains scratches or your drive isn't fast enough to deliver a continuous stream of data at your cd writer's recording speed. As a rule of thumb the source your data is coming from should be at least twice as fast as your recorder to make sure on-the-fly copying doesn't produce coasters.
The fillstate display options finally are somthing for you to play around with. They don't have any effect on Gnometoaster's functionality whatsoever.
One important thing to change here is the ``CDfs Area'' entry,which should point to an empty,writable directory that is used exclusively by Gnometoaster. Do not make this the same directory you're using in the ``Temporary Files'' entry!
You usually shouldn't need to configure any of the other options, with the exception of the ``Mount ISO image with'' and ``Unmount ISO image with'' entries. They should contain valid commands for mounting/unmounting the datatrack of a CDROM in you cd writer. ``recorder'' in those lines is a variable containing the device special file managing your cd writer (e.g. /dev/scd0).
The ``Precache on harddrive'' option is pretty much resembling the corresponding field in ``Common Option''. It determines wether an image file of the datatrack you're mastering should be created on your harddrive before writing the track to a CDR. You should only select this if you're using a really slow system that can't create an ISO track out of the files you decided to go into it as fast as your recorder can write it.
If selected, the last option makes Gnometoaster delete any contents of the directory pointed at by the ``CDfs Area'' entry. As Gnometoaster is building up the filesystem of the CDR you're creating there, this option presents you with a blank Filesystem editor the next time you're running Gnometoaster. The only reason this Option is off by default is that it might unintentedly delete any directory mistakenly entered as ``CDfs Area''.
For most users, the only option of interest in this section should be wether or not to precache audio tracks. A great majority of all CDROM drives are generally slower reading out audio cds than they are reading data cds. So please make sure your drive can deliver audio data fast enough to make on-the-fly writing possible. Also, audiotrack error correction is generally more difficult so your throughput might go down considerably for older/scratched cds.
This section is responsible for all file to track conversions done by gnometoaster. If you want to record an mp3 or wav file to an audio cd, this is where the necessary plugins are configured. Gnometoaster is currently preconfigured for 3 different audio file types:
This is where you configure the CDROM drives and CD recorders installed on your system. Generally, you should try clicking ``Scan Bus'' which invokes some autodetect functionality built into Gnometoaster. In about 90% of all cases you won't need to do anything else. Please make sure, though, that Gnometoaster really did detect all your drives correctly. At least one drive (the recorder), should have the recorder flag set, which is indicated by a small symbol in the leftmost row of the drive list. To keep Gnometoaster up to date about your system configuration, you should perform the autodetect function whenever you change your drive configuration (e.g. you move a cdrom drive from one IDE channel to the other or change it from master to slave or you change the LUN(s) of one or more of your scsi drives). You can edit any entry of Gnometoaster's drive list by selecting it and clicking ``Edit''. You can manually add drives by clicking the ``Add'' button as well as remove drives clicking ``Remove''. Note that all changes to the drive list apply immediately, the undo function of the preferences dialog won't work for the drive list.
You can select from a list of available audio device drivers here. The content of this list depends on what options were available at compile-time. Currently, support for the Open Sound system as well as the Enlightenment sound daemon is available. If you're using Gnome as your desktop environment of choice, you should make sure to select ESD support here as this will allow gnometoaster to share your soundcard with other applications.
In most cases, you won't have to change anything here except the paths to cdrecord and cdrdao. As both programs should be avaible in your exec path anyway there's usually no need to do any changes to those entries either. Just leave everything at it's default to be on the safe side. For more informations about configuring the recorder options see the chapter about advanced configuration in this manual.
And that's already it! Now your Gnometoaster installation should be prepared for a first recording test. Please proceed to reading the user documentation now on how to test your Gnometoaster setup as well as to learn how to use Gnometoaster to create CDRs.
Now that you have setup Gnometoaster and the system it is running on, you'll probably quite eagerly await the moment when you can record your first CDR with Gnometoaster. But first we should do a first test if everything is working. If you are using Gnometoaster with a CD/RW recorder,insert a CD/RW blank and click the ``Clear Disc'' button in the toolbar. If you don't have a toolbar (GNOME support disabled),press the recorder icon in the lower left edge of the Gnometoaster window and press the ``Clear Disc'' button in the ``notebook page'' showing up. Gnometoaster should now show a dialog keeping you up-to-date about the cleaning process which should disappear after a few minutes. Notice the terminal labelled ``Client output'' to the right of the recorder page. It shows the output of cdrecord while blanking your CD/RW. In case you should see an error message there please check your configuration and consult the troubleshooting section of this Documentation in case you can't find anything unusual.
You should now spend a few minutes browsing through the notebook pages in the lower section of Gnometoaster's main window.
The first icon leads to a file manager displaying a virtualfilesystem. Editing this filesystem (e.g. adding files, deleting files, creating directories) will not affect any filesystem or directory of your computer directly. What you're editing in Gnometoaster's Filesystem editor is merely a prototype of hypothetical data track on the CDR you want to create.
The second icon is bringing up Gnometoaster's track editor. As with the filesystem editor, this is just a virtual list of tracks. It will become ``real'' as soon as you press Gnometoaster's record button.
With the last icon you can reach a page with various recorder settings. You can use this page to adjust your recording settings to your needs, e.g. you can set the recorder speed, the type of lead-out you want to write, wether or not your cd should be bootable.
The upper half of the Gnometoaster window is showing a list of data sources, notably an item called ``Unix tree'', one called ``CDROM drives'' and one called ``Internal structures''. Clicking the ``Unix tree'' item will make it expand into your directory structure starting at your system's root directory. Simply click a directory to make it's contents appear to the right of the tree. Expanding ``CDROM drives'' will show a list resembling the CDROM units installed on your system. Clicking one of the drives will show a list of tracks of the medium in that particular drive.Finally, ``Internal structures'' will show just one item, the ``Gnometoaster filesystem''.
Generally, you can drag any item showing up in the upper half of the Gnometoaster window down into both the track editor and the filesystem editor of the lower half. In fact that's how you will create your CDRs. If you press your right mouse button instead of the left one Gnometoaster will automatically create a copy of the data you added on your harddrive. This can be usefuly when working with multiple removable media. Additionally to the source section, files may also be dragged into Gnometoaster from external sources like your favourite filemanager.
Now finally notice Gnometoaster's fillstate display at the bottom of the main window. It should display a percentage of space used up by your tracks on the CDR you're about to create as well as the space used in MB and audio playing time. MB sizes are displayed for the audio track representation of all tracks7.
This section describes how to record files (e.g. graphics files or other documents) on a CDR. To write files to a CDR simply drag them from the ``Unix tree'' section in the upper half of the Gnometoaster window or from your favourite file manager into the filesystem editor (use the first in the list of icons to the lower left of your Gnometoaster window)8.You can delete files, create directories and rename files or directories by selecting the affected files and clicking the right mouse button to make a menu containing several options pop up. If you select the root item of the filesystem editor's file tree and select rename, you can set you data track's Volume ID.
Finally, make sure your filesystem is part of Gnometoaster's destination tracklist. The ``Gnometoaster Filesystem'' located in the ``Internal structures'' folder in Gnometoaster's source area is the track-representation of the virtual filesystem you just edited. It's getting added to the tracklist automatically if it is empty when you start editing the virtual filesystem. If you're done just hit the record button in Gnometoaster's toolbar or, if you're using the plain Gtk version, change to the recording options panel and press record there. Notice that the recording options panel is also giving you some control about the recording process. You can specify not to fixate a cd or to write a multisession TOC9 as well as you can select the writing speed and wether or not to eject the CDR after writing.
If you're planning to record an audio cd, the first thing you'll be bound to care about is where your audio data is going to come from. Gnometoaster is providing two general methods to create an audio track: building it from a file or taking and existent audio track from another cd.
In the first case, all you need to do is to select the audio file you want to record from Gnometoaster's filesysten tree and drag it down to the Track Editor (the pane connected to the second Icon in the destination area). You'll see an entry being added to the tracklist reading the filename of the audio file it was built from and the audio track size in bytes to the right. Notice, that you can only use audio files of a type Gnometoaster knows about. The default configuration supports .mp3 and .wav files but it is pretty easy to add others (see ``advanced configuration'')10.
The second case is not really much different. Instead of selecting a file from the filesystem tree you select a track from one of the cdrom drives listed in the ``cdrom drives'' tree in gnometoaster's source area.
Finally, you can rearrange the tracks in Gnometoaster's tracklist to make the playing order more interesting. To do so,just drag the tracks around in the listl. Did you notice that tracks are always inserted into the tracklist at where you released your mouse button ? All you need to do now is adjusting your recorder settings the way you want them and hit ``record''.
Audio CDs created with Gnometoaster are generally playable with any audio cd player unless they are multisession discs (might work with some players) or not ``fixated'' (the leadout hasn't been written).
Hint: In rare cases it could happen that Gnometoaster will not be able to calculate the playing time of an mp3 or wav file correctly. This is especially true for files containing small defects (e.g. an mp3 file transmitted over digital radio etc.). If you realize that the calculated playing time of your mp3 as display in the tracklist differs from it's real playing time, drag it into the tracklist with your right mouse button pressed. This will make Gnometoaster precache your mp3 file which will make Gnometoaster know the real size of the raw audio stream as decoded by e.g. mpg123.
The process of creating a mixed mode CDR with gnometoaster is a mere combination of the steps described in 2.1.2 and 2.1.3. Remember, the data track edited in Gnometoaster's filesystem editor can be found in the ``internal structures'' section of the source area. Make sure it always is the first track in your tracklist and you should be perfectly fine. Just add whatever audio tracks you need behind the ``Gnometoaster filesystem'' track in the tracklist.
Gnometoaster supports creating more than one data tracks on a CDR. This is as simple as just dragging the desired tracks to the tracklist in the order you want them,the only restriction is that two instances of the ``Gnometoaster filesystem'' will always contain the same filesystem structure. This might change in future releases. Also note that tracks other than the first one can't be read by most operating systems. The only OS fully supporting more than one data tracks on a single cd I know of is BeOS(tm).
In some situations it can be important to make a backup copy of a cdrom. This can be easily accomplished with Gnometoaster by selecting the cdrom drive the cd you want to copy resides in. Select all the tracks and drag them to Gnometoaster's track editor. Check your recorder options and hit record.
If configured properly, Gnometoaster lets you create Multisession discs just the way your favourite Windows(tm) application does. This is how it works:
When the first CDROMs hit the market, there were no cd recorders and there was no way to alter the contents of a written CD in any way. When the first recorders came out soon voices could be heard asking why they couldn't just append files to their backups done with the cd recorder, after all the free space on a CDR is visible even with your bare eyes if there simply wasn't enough data to fill a whole CD. With CDs traditionally being a write-once medium, there was no easy way to just append data to it. The result was that a slightly modified type of TOC11 was created, containing an additional field with a pointer beyond the currently written area of the CD so's CD recorders would know where to continue writing.
So what does all this have to do with Gnometoaster ? Well, to create a multisession disc, that is a disc you can append data to later on, you have to select the ``Multisession'' Option in Gnometoaster's recording panel. This will make Gnometoaster write the special kind of TOC necessary to make the disc appendable.
To append tracks to your multisession disc, simply drag them to trackedit and hit record. If you're sure you don't want to add any more tracks to a particular disc you can unselect the ``Multisession'' option when writing the last session12.
Now how do you append files to an existing ISO track stored on a multisession disc ? To accomplish this, a concept called session-linking was introduced. With it, you can tell any multisession capable cdrom drive to link two tracks of different sessions together. However, doing so requires some informations about the last session when creating the track containing the files you want to append to the disc. So before you can start adding files using Gnometoaster's filesystem editor you have to click the ``Import'' icon or select ``Import session'' in Gnometoaster's Edit menu while making sure that the disc you want to append your session to is residing in your cd writer. Your writer will now show some reading activities over a few seconds and once it's done you'll notice that all files already stored on your multisession disc will appear in Gnometoaster's Filesystem Editor in blue color to make clear that they belong to the last session. You can now edit your Filesystem as usual (e.g. add files,create directories etc.) with the only exception that you can't delete any files or directories of the last session yet. This functionality will, however, be added in a later version of Gnometoaster. Once you're done, hit record and enjoy. If you plan on adding any further sessions, make sure you select the ``Multisession'' option in Gnometoaster's recording panel.
Gnometoaster currently supports the most common type of a bootable CDROM: floppy disk emulation. In this mode, your PCs BIOS is providing some basic CROM access functions that can read out an image file of a bootable floppy disc stored on your CDROM. Using this image, your BIOS will transparently emulate a normal floppy disc in this mode of operation, e.g. when making your CDR bootable using an image of a DOS boot disk, you'll have this image visible to your system as drive A: once booting is done. Note that floppy emulation as well as any other emulations do only work as long as the BIOS is being used to access your disk drive. This deserves specific notion as Linux is using it's own floppy drivers as soon as the kernel has been loaded.
With this concept in mind it should be pretty easy to create a bootable CDR with Gnometoaster. Just drag the bootable floppy image you want to use into Gnometoaster's Filesystem Editor. Now select it and press the right mouse button. Choos ``Make Bootimage'' in the popup menu and you're done. Now add whatever you want to your CD and hit record.
If you take a look at the recording panel you'll find a section called ``El Torito'' there. El Torito is the name of the standard defining bootable CDs. So consequently you'll find configuration options regarding bootable CDs there. There's not much you'll ever need to do in this section of the recording panel. It's there merely to show the current state of your CDR regarding booting capabilities. In case you should suddenly decide not to make your CD bootable after all you can unselect the ``Make bootable'' option there. The other way would be to just delete the boot image from Gnometoaster's Filesystem Editor. If the selected bootimage doesn't point to an existing file, the ``Make bootable'' option will be grayed out.
CD/RW media are a fine thing for backups and to share your files and music with friends. You can work with CD/RW media just the way you do with normal CDRs within Gnometoaster. There's really just one thing you'll need additionally to the normal functions if you're using CD/RWs: disc blanking.
To blank a CD/RW disc with Gnometoaster you just have to click the ``Blank Disc'' icon in your toolbar or press the ``Blank Disc'' button of Gnometoaster's recording panel. Note that Gnometoaster supports two ways of blanking discs: a full blank and TOC only.
Performing a full blank your cd recorder is burning it's way through the whole CD/RW medium and erasing any data on it. Depending on your cd writer's speed this can take as long as your disc's maximum playing time so you will usually want to clear the TOC only, which will fool the cd record into seeing a blank medium while really just the first few sectors are blank. Clearing a disc this way is taking less than two minutes at double-speed13.
Disc-at-once recording has been a buzz-word among audiophiles for quite some time now. One of the major problems early cd recorders had was the fact that they could only write one track at once. Between tracks, those devices had to reposition and recalibrate their lasers, leaving 2 seconds between tracks unusable for recording. Indeed, those 2 seconds are filled with rubbish and explicitly silenced by your audio cd player. If your audio player is somewhat old, you might actually end up hearing that rubbish. Anyways, a 2 seconds gap between tracks is a live cd killer and that's why there's been an enormous interest in getting rid of this gap. Most modern cd writers hence support a mode of operation where the whole cd is being written at once. Of course, this also sets certain requirements on the recording software used.
There are a few things you should know about Gnometoaster's disc-at-once capabilities: While Joerg Schilling's cdrecord is perfectly capable of writing cds in dao mode, it can't do the trick ``on-the-fly'', essentially requiring the user to store all audio data to be written on cd to his harddrive in either .wav or .raw format. As this doesn't fit Gnometoaster's conception very well, I chose to use cdrdao, yet another cd recording backend, for dao recording. So in order to record cds in dao mode, you'll have to have cdrdao installed on your system14. You don't have to perform any special configuration steps within Gnometoaster to make dao recording work.
To record a CDR in dao mode, simply check the ``Disc-at-once'' option in the recording panel and hit record.
Less and less people will find themselves in the situation where they can't record an mp3 file to a cdr because their computer simply can't manage to decode the mp3 stream as fast as their writer needs it's raw audio stream. Or just imagine you want to make a copy of this very old compact disc which has been used as a flying saucer by your son several times as well as by your wife to make your dining table stand more stable etc. No CDROM built upon earth technology will be able to read those CDs accurately within a time that would satisfy your recorder.
In Gnometoaster, there's a way around this. You can either enable precaching for a particular track type in Gnometoaster's preferences which will then apply to any track of that type or, alternatively, you can hold down your right mouse button when dragging your files/tracks to the Track Editor. This concept even works for the Filesystem Editor. Just imagine you want to create a backup of that old word processor's installation discs cause 1.44'' Discs have always had a slight tendency to forget about their contents after a few years. Precaching the whole ISO9660 filesystem won't do in this case cause you need to change discs quite a few times while creating the filesystem. Again, the solution is to just hold down your right mouse key while adding the files on your discs, which will make Gnometoaster precache those individual files.
While functionality to convert tracks to files is provided by most cd recording programs, few let you decide as accurately as Gnometoaster does what to make of those tracks. Imagine you want to store your favourite audio CD's contents on your harddisk as mp3 files. There's plenty of other software available for this, I've been using one called grip for quite some time now. However, if we have to provide a proper interface for creating .wav files anyway, why not support the whole bunch of extensions and file types that are supported by Gnometoaster the other way round ?
So the deal is this: You can drag any track down to the Filesystem Editor and it will be converted into it's default filetype automatically. Dragging it with the right mouse button pressed will prompt you with a popup menu asking for a specific filetype to be created.
If you don't want to add your track to the Filesystem Editor but want to store it into some directory on your harddrive, you can select all the tracks you want and press the right mouse button. Simply select ``Save Track as ...'' in the popup menu. You'll be prompted for a destination directory and the filetype you want to convert to. Note that with properly configured encoder settings mp3 files will automatically get their mp3 tags set appropriately if your computer is connected to a cddb server.
Hint: You can also use Gnometoaster's file conversion scheme to convert existing files of a certain type on your harddrive. Just drag the files you want to convert down to the Track Editor. This will convert them into tracks. Dragging them back up to Gnometoaster's builtin file manager or using their context menu you can now save them as whatever type of file you want.
Some things just can't be covered in the normal documentation. And apart from that, the documentation is unfortunately the last place your average user would look for a solution to his/her problems. That's why FAQs have a very long tradition I don't want to break with Gnometoaster. So here it is: the Gnometoaster FAQ, assembled using bits from emails and postings to the mailing list and some of my genuine fantasy.
You have to configure the ``Cdfs Area'' in Gnometoaster's preferences setup to point to a valid, writeable directory used exclusively by Gnometoaster. Please follow the installation and setup instructions of the manual to get Gnometoaster running.
Some users seem to have a problem using Gtk's multiselect scheme. To drag multiple items you can either choose each individual item or simply drag a bunch of items in a row. The difference is that you use the CTRL key for the former while you use the SHIFT key for the latter. The rest is just the same. Click the first item you want to drag. Either click the last item of a row or the next item you want to drag while holding down your SHIFT or CTRL key respectively. When selecting the last one of the items you want to drag, don't release the mouse button but start dragging your mouse to the desired destination for your items. That's it.
There may be many reasons for this. First of all, check that your cdrom drives are setup properly. If they are, please make sure the corresponding device special files have the appropriate permissions. If you're using the scsi generic interface to read out audio tracks, make sure cdda2wav has the correct permissions to access the sg interface. For some types of cds (notably cd-plus cds) you need a recent version of cdda2wav in order to be able to digitally extract audio tracks. As of this time, Gnometoaster is being developed based on version 1.9 of Jörg Schilling's cd recording tools.
First of all, make sure you selected the ``fixate'' switch and deselected the ``Multisession'' switch in Gnometoaster's recording panel while creating your CD. Also scan Gnometoaster's recording terminal for eventual error messages produced by cdrecord while fixating your disc (all errors are marked red in the recording terminal). If none of the above applies, you're probably using a very old cd player that can't handle CDR discs. Sorry, you're out of luck there unless you upgrade your cd player. I also noticed recently that some DVD players aren't capable of handling CDR and CDRW media while they're playing plain audio CDs just fine. This is just one of the many things you should take care of when buying a DVD player. Finally, some very cheap blanks can't be read by some audio cd players. This is because the organic layer used for recording you music is very thin on those CDRs and your cd player's laser might be looking straight through it. Using a lower recording speed might sometimes solve this issue.
This generally means that either you don't have mpg123 or sox respectively installed on your system (future versions of Gnometoaster will have to check for this and issue a warning) or (which is more probable) the mp3 file you tried to record was corrupt in some way. Although mpg123 tries hard to play defective mp3s, sometimes it will get out of sync and stop playing entirely.
see section 3.3 about possible reasons for this behavior.
Please follow the instructions of the Gnometoaster manual.
Please check the mountpoint of your cd writer as entered in Gnometoaster's drive setup. Also make sure that a corresponding entry in /etc/fstab is present and, if you're running Gnometoaster as a non-root user, the writer is user-mountable (the ``user'' option is present in the corresponding line of /etc/fstab).
Make sure you check the ``fixate'' switch in Gnometoaster's recording panel. When writing multisession discs, this switch should be checked permanently.
This has been a known bug for quite some time which has been fixed in recent releases of Gnometoaster. If you're still experiencing this bug, please upgrade to a more recent version of Gnometoaster. If you don't want to upgrade, one possible way to get rid of this problem is to recompile gnometoaster with multithreading disabled: just pass -without-pthreads to the ./configure script and recompile gnometoaster.
This has also been a known bug for quite some time which has been fixed in recent releases. If you don't want to upgrade, you can get rid of it by simply deleting the ~/.gtoaster.dircache file in your home directory.
This is a question very specific to the way you installed Gnometoaster. If you've installed Gnometoaster from a ready-made package, use your distribution's package manager to uninstall Gnometoaster. If you installed Gnometoaster from sourcecode, please reextract the source archive, change into it and type ``./configure'' and then ``make uninstall'' as root.
You probably don't have one or more of the required support libraries installed on your system. Note that the source distribution of Gnometoaster not only needs all the libraries like libgtk or libgnomeui32 etc. but also their header files.In most distributions those can be found in packages with the usual name and ``-dev'' or ``-devel'' appended. Older versions of Gnometoaster didn't compile on Linux 2.0.x systems. Please upgrade to a more recent version of Gnometoaster. The way to make your older version of Gnometoaster compile on those systems would be to replace all occurrences of #include <linux/cdrom.h> by #include <linux/ucdrom.h> in the source code. As mentioned, recent versions of Gnometoaster are taking care of this automatically.
Please remove the -a option from the mkisofs call in Gnometoaster's preferences setup. Recent mkisofs versions don't support this option any more, issuing a warning instead which voids Gnometoaster's tracksize calculation. Recent versions of Gnometoaster have their default configuration changed to address this problem. Upgrading from an older version will give you the opportunity to automatically fix this issue. Just answer the upgrade questions occurring when first running the new version of Gnometoaster with yes. There is also a slight possibility that you have a very old version of mkisofs installed on your system which doesn't yet support the -print-size option. In this case there is no other way than updating mkisofs.
PLEASE ENSURE MKISOFS IS ACTUALLY INSTALLED ON YOUR SYSTEM. ALTHOUGH MENTIONED ALMOST EVERYWHERE IN THE DOCS AND ON THE HOMEPAGE THERE ARE STILL PEOPLE SIMPLY FORGETTING TO MAKE SURE GNOMETOASTER'S DEPENDENCIES ARE MET. FUTURE VERSIONS WILL PERFORM A SYSTEM SANITY CHECK AT STARTUP BUT UNTIL THEN YOU'LL HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THOSE MATTERS YOURSELF.
This has been a problem with older versions of Gnometoaster and the way they invoked mpg123. Please add both the -stereo and the -r 44100 option to the mpg123 call in Gnometoaster's filetype registry or upgrade to a more recent version of Gnometoaster.
Gnometoaster in it's current state of development is unapt to make large harddrive backups. The problem you're facing is caused by symbolic links. Gnometoaster is using symbolic links internally to build up the filesystem tree of your cd. Because of that, no ``real'' symbolic links can be recorded on cd. So Gnometoaster has to get rid of them by resolving them into normal directories and files. While this is not a problem for files (they simply get written twice), it definitely can be for directories. Take, for example, a typical gnome user's home directory. it contains a directory .gnome-desktop with links to the home directory itself, all cdrom and disk drives of the system and maybe even a link back to the root directory. As Gnometoaster has to resolve all those links into normal directories, each containing all data referenced by the link, it should be easy to imagine how long this can take on a large system. I'm working on this problem and the next release of Gnometoaster should finally get rid of this issue but until then, please don't use Gnometoaster for harddisk backups.
There's most probably some problem with your system's or Gnometoaster's audio configuration. Please enter Gnometoaster's preferences setup and change the audio output driver from ``Enlightenment sound daemon'' to ``Open Sound System''. ESD mode only works if the enlightenment sound daemon is running in the background but it is a very nice way of accessing your sound card as it allows for sharing it with other applications.
in case you still can't hear anything, please check your system's sound setup (e.g. if the kernel sound module is being loaded correctly) and make sure that no other applications are blocking your sound hardware.
With older versions of Gnometoaster selecting a track/file and pressing the ''Play'' button won't work. You have to either drag your desired item to the ``Play'' button or double-click the item. This is not a bug but a conceptual thing which will be fixed in future versions of Gnometoaster, I just thought you should know it cause this apparently driving some people crazy.
Please check the ``Disc-at-once'' option in Gnometoaster's recording panel and make sure you have cdrdao installed and setup properly. Future versions of Gnometoaster will allow you to adjust the size of the pregap, you will even be able to place sound within the pregap.
DAO and TAO writing are performed using different backends. While cdrecord is being used for TAO recording, cdrdao is being used in DAO mode. Both programs have different hardware requirements so please make sure your system meets the requirements of the backend you're trying to use and especially that the backend is installed and setup correctly on your system (e.g. with access to the scsi generic interface).
Please read the documentation from the very beginning. I've tried very hard to explain all the implications of cd writing with linux/other unix systems but this won't help you unless you read it.
There are two modes of addressing a cdrom drive on unix/linux systems: using the scsi interface and using cooked ioctl() calls to the cdrom's device special file. Gnometoaster is using the latter by default cause this is increasing the probability that DAE will work on a system at all. However, some cdrom drives are much faster reading out audio data using the scsi generic interface. To make Gnometoaster use the SCSI generic interface for DAE, just select the ``use scsi generic for DAE'' flag on the properties page of the desired drive. You can get access to the drive properties from Gnometoaster's drive setup. Just select the desired drive and click ``Edit''.
To understand this behavior you have to know that the data track part of your cd is represented by a data track within Gnometoaster's tracklist. This track is called ``Gnometoaster Internal Filesystem'' and if it doesn't exist in the tracklist, your data track will not be taken into account when writing the cd. To add you filesystem to the tracklist, drag it from ``Internal structures'' down into the tracklist. You'll find your fillstate display the tracksize of your Filesystem immediately. Note that the Gnometoaster internal filesystem is being added to the tracklist automatically when the Filesystem is being edited and there are no other tracks in the tracklist yet. In all other cases, you have to add the Filesystem track manually.
The answer is as simple as sad. All backend applications Gnometoaster is using are under continuous development. Putting them all together on an ftp server or something would require someone maintaining this server on a full-time basis. This is beyond the possibilities of a voluntary project like Gnometoaster. However, with more and more Linux distributions prepackaging Gnometoaster, those problems should go away in the future as long as you keep using the tested and mostly stable Gnometoaster packages coming with your distribution. Those packages have dependency informations built-in and won't install unless all the dependencies are met. Together with a package manager capable of automatically resolving dependency issues it should be easy to install Gnometoaster. Linux distributions coming with Gnometoaster include Debian Linux, Linux Mandrake, Turbo Linux. If you're maintaining a Linux distribution coming with Gnometoaster, please write me so's I can include your distribution in this list.
This does indeed depend on your distribution. First of all, check if there's a package explicitly made for your distribution. If there isn't, check if your distribution is RedHat compatible or does at least use RedHat's package manager. In this case it should be secure to just download and install a redhat package from Gnometoaster's homepage (Distributions that should work with RedHat packages include RedHat itself, Linux Mandrake, SuSE Linux). If you are using Debian or a Debian-based distribution (which includes Corel Linux and Stormix) please use the Debian package instead.
Of course, there's always the option of compiling Gnometoaster yourself from the source package. This will ensure that you're using the most recent version of Gnometoaster as well as that there isn't some sort of binary incompatibility to the libraries installed on your system. Please follow the instructions in this manual on how to install the source distribution of Gnometoaster.
Just press the ``Stop'' button of the recording dialog. Note that this may not have an immediate effect as Gnometoaster is giving the recording backend a chance to exit gracefully. In case the recording backend doesn't exit, you can send it a SIGTERM signal using the commandline by typing ``killall cdrecord'' or ``killall cdrdao'' depending on wether you're recording in TAO or DAO mode. Gnometoaster will then return to it's normal mode of operation and you can start a second attempt of recording your CDR by just pressing the ``record'' button again.
Gnometoaster is calculating the sizes of all tracks as if they were audio tracks. There are various modes in which a track can be recorded to a CDR. The most important ones are audio mode and MODE1 data mode. The latter reserves extra space per sector to store additional checksums which is necessary to maintain the high level of data security needed when storing binary data. As a result, less data can be stored to a CDR in data mode than in audio mode. This makes for the difference between 746MB and 650MB.
No Problem! Although Gnometoaster doesn't currently adapt it's fillstate display to to increased storage size of 80 min. blanks Gnometoaster is still perfectly capable of using all space available on such blanks. You can even record more than the usual 650MB of data to a normal blank using Gnometoaster. How much more depends on the type of blank you're using.
This is a known issue. Unfortunately, drag and drop is handled differently by KDE applications than it is by Gtk/Gnome and most other applications like StarOffice, Netscape, ... Efforts are underway to support the XDnd protocol used by Gnometoaster within KDE so this issue should go away in the future. First tests with the upcoming KDE2.0 however show that KDE is still lacking Gtk/Gnome compatible Drag and Drop support.
Please read this warning carefully. Note that by definition, compact discs cannot hold any tracks smaller than ~ 4secs. of playing time. cdrdao will refuse to record such tracks while cdrecord will pad them to a bigger size. Future versions of Gnometoaster will address this problem in a more sane way so this is something for the ``known bugs'' chapter.
This is a known problem. It has been fixed for writing cds in the threaded version of Gnometoaster. However, if you have, for some reason, pthreads support disabled on your system, there's hardly a chance to make those progress boxes update correctly for you. You should upgrade to a newer kernel/libc combination that supports multithreading.
Gnometoaster doesn't support reading the data track of a CD-Plus CD as of now. This functionality will be implemented in one of the next versions.
Don't worry, it's just the CDDB routine trying to identify the cds in your cdrom drives.
The current version of Gnometoaster doesn't provide a switch to disable cddb lookups. Instead, I'd suggest to set your localhost as the cddb server Gnometoaster should attempt to use. Doing so will make Gnometoaster try to establish a connection to your localhost's cddb port every 20 seconds which will of course fail but this won't do you any harm.
You probably added your files to the Track Editor rather than the File Editor with the result that Gnometoaster created a CD containing several data tracks each being a copy of one of the files you added (just as if those files had been track images). Add your files to the Filesystem Editor and your CDs will work just fine.
True. However, cdrecord and cdda2wav require their controlling user to have access privileges to the scsi bus which are not granted to normal users by default within any sane setup. However, you can give your users explicit access to your cd writer(s) and your cdrom drives by setting the access privileges of the /dev/sgx (where x depends on the bus nmbr. and target id of your writer) and the devices controlling your cdrom. Probably the best way to do this is to create a new group ``cdwriter'' using the addgroup command, add all users that should be allowed to burn cds to that group by editing the /etc/groups file and then typing chown :cdwriter /dev/sgx and chmod g+rw /dev/sgx. Make sure to also give access to the cdrom device file associated with your writer and any cdrom drive you want to use. On most systems you just have to add your desired users to the existing cdrom group in /etc/groups.
Of course, if security is a non-issue on your system, you could also just grant access to those devices to anybody by typing chmod a+rw /dev/whatever or set cdrecord and cdda2wav +suid root by typing chmod a+s /usr/bin/cdrecord and chmod a+s /usr/bin/cdda2wav. Again, don't forget to grant access to your cdrom device special files. Otherwise, Gnometoaster won't be able to read out the TOC of your discs and just display nothing in your drive's tracklist.
Setting the Gnometoaster binary +suid root is explicitly deprecated !!! This will enable any user on your system to read out *any* files not only by using some obscure commandline program but by using a comfortable filemanager! On most setups this is definitely not what you would want!.
UNFORTUNATELY, SOME VERSIONS OF CDRECORD SEEM TO DEPEND ON THE ABILITY TO DISABLE SWAPPING FOR CERTAIN MEMORY REGIONS. INSTEAD OF JUST TRYING TO RECORD YOUR STUFF ANYWAY, THOSE VERSIONS WILL EXIT IMMEDIATELY IF THEY COULDN'T DISABLE SWAPPING FOR THEIR BUFFER MEMORY. THIS, OF COURSE, IS A PRIVILEGED OPERATION ONLY ALLOWED TO THE SUPERUSER. SO ALL YOU CAN DO IN THIS CASE IS TO SET CDRECORD +SUID ROOT. I HAVEN'T INVESTIGATED INTO THIS ANY FURTHER BUT I THINK IT IS EVIDENT THAT ON MOST MODERN SYSTEMS BUFFER SPACE IN THE AMOUNTS NEEDED BY CDRECORD WON'T BE SWAPPED OUT ANYWAY DURING THE RECORDING PHASE AS IT IS TOO FREQUENTLY USED.
I'd love to support disc-at-once writing with cdrecord cause this would simplify the procedure of setting up a system for Gnometoaster immensely and cdrecord has a much larger base of supported recorders but cdrecord can't write any tracks or files on-the-fly when in DAO mode. This doesn't fit at all into Gnometoaster's conception where everything can be done on-the-fly if your hardware is fast enough. Some day there may be support for writing on-the-fly in disc-at-once mode with cdrecord. Once this sort of functionality is there, I'll support it.
This is how Gnometoaster is doing things. Instead of telling cdrdao to take whatever it takes to create a cd out of files on your harddrives it is actively delivering all content necessary for this to cdrdao using it's stdin pipe. This way, Gnometoaster can control what's being written on cd in realtime, which is absolutely essential if you want to burn stuff on-the-fly. For cdrdao it doesn't matter if a certain audiotrack has it's origin in another cd, a wav file or an mp3 file. Audiotracks look all the same for cdrdao, it's Gnometoaster making the difference in preparing the data for it.
Unless I get confirmation about this, I assume that there are different versions of cdrecord around, ones that can work in non-privileged mode and ones that can't because they're trying to prevent the linux kernel from swapping out their memory buffers (which won't happen anyway unless you have a system with a very small amount of ram, say about 4MB or something :-)). Try to get a new/different version of cdrecord and you might be lucky to implement your security concept after all, otherwise you'll just have to set cdrecord +suid root.
Maybe you didn't setup your cd writer in the preferences. One of the drives listed in Gnometoaster's drivelist has to be the cd recorder. Select the ``This drive can write CDs'' switch in the drive setup to tell Gnometoaster that a specific drive is a recorder.
Gnometoaster's primary development target is currently x86 Linux. Gnometoaster should compile on any platform Linux is running on like Alpha,Sparc etc. However, there may be problems with Endianness, especially with new features as I don't have a BigEndian based system available for testing. You should be on the safe side if you're using a prepackaged version of Gnometoaster like that coming with Debian/Alpha etc. If you found an Endian bug or something like that, don't keep it to yourself, share it with the rest of us.
As of a windows version: This sort of thing is not even in the planning phase. For various reasons such a port will probaby never be done by myself. However, if you feel that Gnometoaster is absolutely the thing the windows world needs and you want to make a port of it, you're of course welcome. Maybe we can even work out something to accomplish this within the same sourcetree. Note that cdrecord's already there and that there's even a port of the Gtk Toolkit available so the job shouldn't be too hard after all.
This sort of bug probably won't have a chance to last long. Just take a look at the Gnometoaster Homepage and check for a new version or a bugfix/patch. Sometimes it may not be visible clearly enough which is the most current version, esp. if you're downloading a prepackaged version of Gnometoaster so please make absolutely sure that you're using the most current version available.
If you still have problems using Gnometoaster, feel free to write to A.Eckleder@bigfoot.com or share your problems with the members of the Gnometoaster mailing list (gnometoaster@lists.kando.hu).
For other references see http://gnometoaster.rulez.org
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