Revived post, for posterity

October 14, 2003 0 comments

Note, these instructions were getting a lot of clicks from a random site, but they weren’t available except at archive.org, and I don’t know if they work anymore, but they did in 2003 Here they are, reposted. (-Rich 2006-03-27)

How to burn a CD in GnomeToaster from FLAC files.
This will hopefully help people out trying to burn FLAC files that they get off of Magnatune or Sharing
the groove or wherever. These people have to be running Linux or some such UNIXy OS that can run GnomeToaster (hopefully people can use this info to
create KDE centric and command line (or perl scripts) that do the same thing).
The nice thing about this is that it lets you do Disk at once (DAO) recording
on the fly, which produces a CD with no gaps between tracks. for a 50 some
minute CD this takes less than 5 minutes on this 16x burner here.

Here are the instructions:

  1. Open GnomeToaster (it may need you to be root, you’ve been warned :-) ) and click on Edit -> Preferences… -> Filetypes
  2. Click the Add Filetype button.
  3. On the new Filetype line (you should just be able to copy and paste for the most part the parts in quotes below):
    • Change the Suffix text box to read “.flac”
    • Change the Format to “big Endian” (weird but true considering my machine is little Endian)
    • Change the Filtername to “flac -d -s -c – -|sox -t .wav – -t .raw -r 44100 -w -x -c 2 -s -”
    • Change the first Detect size command to “metaflac –list “$file”" (keep the quotes around “$file”.)
    • Change the second Detect size command to “strval(regexp("^  total samples: ([0-9]*)"))*4” (once again keep the quotes around “^  total samples: ([0-9]*)“) (also note the 2 spaces after the ^, it’s an inflexible regex, but I don’t know the exact engine so I didn’t mess around)
  4. Click Ok, or Apply and drag a .flac file to the hard to read on my monitor Drag ‘n Play button in the lower right hand corner. If you hear the file, then you are good to go and you can drag the tracks onto a cd.
  5. The key here is that you can do disk at once recording on the fly, thereby eliminating between track gaps, so be sure to select Disk at once from the burning tab on the main gtoaster screen.

Please write to me in the writeback (err comments) link below if you find this helpful. Also, it is of note to some that I tried to do this without sox (should work right?) using “flac –force-raw-format -s -d –sign=unsigned –endian=little –” but for some reason (no matter what the endian) gtoaster produced an
overdriven sound when I dragged the .flac file onto the Drag ‘n Play button. I didn’t try actually burning to see what would come out as I had already made to many coasters at that point. Hope this brings FLAC to a wider audience (aka the random 1 linux user who finds this in a google cache 4 months from now), as it is the best lossless format (and it’s free).