Gnome Toaster is a cd creation suite for Linux and FreeBSD (testers wanted!). Thought to be as user-friendly as possible it lets you create cd recordables with just a few simple mouse clicks.
Create your CDs by simply dragging the desired contents onto it's display window. Although certainly the various programs available for Windows have been an example how people expect an easy-to-use cd creation suit to be, Gnometoaster is trying to do things differently in various ways.
Not only can Gnometoaster write mp3 files to a disc on-the-fly, it can also encode them. Besides mp3, almost all other common file formats can be used by just specifying their respecting commandline players as a "plugin" in Gnometoaster's unique Filetype registry. This is how Gnometoaster gains maximum use of the immensely large collection of tools available to the Linux community, combining them all into a single, easy to use interface for a specific purpose.
Although not all of Gnometoaster's intended functionality has been implemented yet (but we're rapidly approaching this state now) ,it already is a powerful authoring and copying tool for audio, data and mixed mode cds. The program includes a Filesystem editor, providing a comfortable desktop for creating data cds without limitations concerning the directory structure of your CD. Individual files can be added or deleted the way you want, which is a very different approach to e.g. xcdroast or gcombust, two other common cd recording frontends for Unix. There is also a track editor for arranging audio tracks on a cd. Audiotracks can currently be taken from other audio cds, wav, mp3 files and whatever happens to be configured in your Filetype registry., e.g. I've successfully tested recording midi files using timidity as a backend. All the user has got to do for creating a cd is to drop whatever contents he wants to be stored on his cd to either the track editor or the filesystem editor. You can use the built-in file and device manager as a source for your drop operations as well as any Gnome-compliant file manager (e.g. Gnome Midnight-Commander).
With Gnome Toaster's Filetypemanager, you can convert virtually any Filetype to it's appropriate tracktype within Gnome Toaster. All you need is a filter program which takes your data as input and outputs the raw track data. For example, mpg123 will do the job for mp3 files. Gnome Toaster is even preconfigured for that one. Record wav, au, voc, whatever comes to your mind using the sox sound converter as a filter to produce just the format needed for cd recording.
A rather unique feature of Gnometoaster is the direct conversion of audio tracks into mp3 files within an ISO9660 project. This way, creating a sampler cd containing your favourite audio tracks as mp3 files is just a matter of a few drag and drop actions. The encoder to be used can be configured freely. Gnometoaster is preconfigured to support the creation of .wav and .mp3 files but ogg vorbis support has succesfully been tested and should be easy to set up.
Supported features:
* Multi-language GUI currently supporting English,French, Japanese,Norwegian,Finnish and German
* Create your own data, audio and mixed mode cds with only a few mouse clicks
* Easy-to-use Gnome/Gtk Interface supporting drag and drop (the actual layout of Gnometoaster depends on wether you have the GNU Network Object model environment (GNOME) installed on your system).
* Copy cds "on-the-fly",without storing images of any kind on your harddrive. Gnometoaster can create 1:1 copies of your audio cds which will even have the same cddb code (Gnometoaster in conjunction with cdrdao). Audio and Data tracks don't have to be stored to your harddrive first, they can be copied immediately from one cd to the other (for audio tracks, this feature is turned off by default as many cdrom drives aren't capable of reading audio tracks fast enough for recording).
* Create ISO Filesystems by drag and drop using a comfortable filemanager
* Create El Torito bootable CDs
* Write ISO Filesystems "on-the-fly" without needing any extra space on your harddrive
* Use Gnometoaster's filter support to write any kind of music as an audio track (e.g. midi,wav,mp3,...),again without the need to store any temporary data on your harddrive. Just drag your favourite music files or even an .m3u playlist file to gnometoaster's tracklist editor and hit record!
* Use Gnometoaster's highly configurable precaching system to buffer tracks on your harddrive if data throughput from a particular medium is not high enough.
* Use Gnometoaster's multisession capabilities to incrementally write your archive cds, editing the existing filesystem structure of your cd within Gnometoaster's filesystem editor. (support for removing directory entries of files stored in the last session will be available in future releases.)
* Listen to your music before you burn it with Gnometoaster's preview player. Just drag your audio files/tracks to the play button and enjoy... Currently,Gnometoaster supports the enlightenment sound daemon (ESD) and the Open Sound System (OSS).
* Support for CD/RW blanking and writing
* Optionally master your CDRs in disc-at-once mode to avoid forced pre-gaps between audio tracks and to make your work ready for mass-production.
* mp3/ogg/wav etc. encoding support using Gnometoaster's unique filetype registry to specify the parameters needed. This way, virtually any fileformat can be created from audiotracks and soon from other file formats.
* Gnometoaster supports both cdrdao and cdrecord for the actual recording process, ensuring a maximum of compatibility with your cd recorder. By using a unique method to control cdrecord, Gnometoaster is currently the only frontend capable of recording discs On-the-fly with cdrecord in Disc-at-once mode.
Some Screenshots:
The following screenshots come from the Gnome-version of Gnometoaster, that is: It has been compiled with Gnome support enabled. Remember that you do not actually need Gnome to run Gnometoaster. The program will,however,look significantly better if you do so. The Gtk-Theme used for those screenshots is called ThinIce.It´s available from http://gtk.themes.org. Please notice that I do not update these Screenshots regularly with each development snapshot. The actual program might thus look a bit different to what you see here.
The Filesystem Editor of Gnome Toaster...
...and the Track Editor
This is Gnometoaster´s preferences menu. What you see here is the page responsible for ISO Filesystem options ...
... and finally this is
Gnometoaster's recording panel .
If you liked this article, subscribe to the feed by clicking the image below to keep informed about new contents of the blog:
0 comments:
Post a Comment