4. Burning a DAO CD

DAO, Disc-At-Once, is as of now the only method for burning a CD without a 2-second pause between the tracks. It's useful for burning party mixes. The program for burning CDs in DAO mode is cdrdao, available from SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdrdao/.

The cdrdao program uses description files called TOC (Table Of Contents, of course). There are two ways to create such file. First is to use a shell script, distributed with cdrdao source (in contrib directory, called generate_toc.sh. It takes a list of .wav files as an argument and produces a cd.toc file. Second way is to simply create such file yourself in a text editor of your choice. Here is a self-explanatory example:

CD_DA

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "mix-01.wav" 0

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "mix-02.wav" 0

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "mix-03.wav" 0

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "mix-04.wav" 0

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "mix-05.wav" 0

The 0 (zero) after the wave filename means start from the beginning of the file. There can be a second number providing the length (time) of file to record. The xcdroast creates similar TOC files, there are also examples in testtocs directory of cdrdao source.

The cdrdao by default uses the device /dev/cdrecorder, which should be a link to the cdwriter device. Assuming your cd recorder device file is /dev/scd0, create the link (as root) as follows:

ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrecorder

Then, assuming that the TOC file is named cd.toc the command to burn the cd is simply:

cdrdao write cd.toc