These people are freaks

[torquill]

Every time I hunt on Google for CD creation software on linux, I find people singing the praises of XCdRoast.

I can't fathom why. I keep trying to use it, and it continues to be a an impossibly arcane, useless piece of crap with a horrendous user interface. No matter what I want to do, none of the buttons will open a dialog to do it. Want to write audio files stored on your hard drive to a CD? Good luck selecting those files, unless you add all relevant directories to a list by hand. Want to pull files from more than one CD for a compilation? If it lets you do that, I haven't discovered how. Half the time it can't even find the CD/DVD drive.

It has plenty of options in the preferences, but not a single checkbox for "Do Not Suck". I'd rather tangle with cdrecord, whose man page insists that you need to define a SCSI bus address (it actually wants a normal device) than punch button after button in XCdRoast, trying to find some dialog that will show me a list of files to add individually to an audio CD.

I don't understand how anyone uses that piece of junk. It's the epitome of the type of program people talk about when condemning open-source software; whereas I can defend most of the programs I use as being much more user-friendly and robust than the negative stereotype, I can't bring myself to stand up for XCdRoast. The people who do must be on crack.

Comments

[foogod.livejournal.com]

Yes, xcdroast is the epitome of everything that's wrong with Open Source GUI software. In my opinion it has singlehandedly set back the Open Source movement at least a year or two by its mere existence (moreso by the fanaticism of it's cracked-out followers)..

It's also, in my opinion, the very definition of useless software: A GUI wrapper for a command-line utility that's harder to use than the command-line utility itself.

..which is why, when I found K3B, I have not looked at xcdroast since, and probably never will again.. I should probably just uninstall it off all my systems.

Is there some reason you're still hunting for CD burning software?

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

K3B, while it rocks in many ways, apparently has a seizure when you ask it to overburn a CD. I wanted an 80:26 audio CD, and each time I tried to do it (a few different ways) in K3B, I had to take down X to free up wedged devices afterward.

I ended up getting cdrecord to talk to me, and it happily burned a perfectly good CD, with nothing more than a couple of stern warnings. Now that I know the syntax, I can use that as a fallback for those rare times when K3B won't do it.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's interesting.. I never ran into that little bug (of course I'm not sure I've ever tried to overburn in K3B).. Good to know, I guess. I might have to do some tests...

[wendelina2.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the documentation for cdrecord is out of date. It used to require the pseudo-SCSI device address. I noticed recently that it doesn't require that any more (thank goodness).

I've never had a problem with Xcdroast, but, then again, I wouldn't sing its praises either. It's just so un-pretty on so many levels.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I didn't know whether it was just the RedHat variants that don't need the SCSI address fed into cdrecord... but after screwing with it for a while and trying to find tips on the net -- no such luck -- I looked at /etc/fstab to see what the mountpoint used (/dev/hdc) and used that. It accepted it cheerfully.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

No, it's not anything RedHat/Fedora specific.. last I checked, the general cdrecord docs still haven't been updated properly since they added the direct ATAPI capabilities to the software (needed for the 2.5/2.6 kernels), so that bit of their documentation is kinda outdated.

I'm not sure whether it's an oversight or whether it's being done out of spite.. I seem to remember there was some disagreement between the kernel folks and the cdrecord developer a while back about the whole direct-ATAPI-support thing..

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

They installed Grip for me here - and it works. No arguments. Hmm. Find a link -

http://nostatic.org/grip/

There.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I used Grip, lo a long time ago. It was okay then, but not as stable as I would have liked. I expect it's improved since. Since I rip and encode my own MP3s with a homemade script, I have less use for that side of Grip these days. I didn't have a chance to check out its burning capabilities back then.

K3B really does rock on toast most days -- and you can't beat the mascot of a penguin with an acetylene torch. Booya! :)

[foogod.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware that Grip ever supported any sort of burning.. there's no mention of it on their web page either. (it's not bad for ripping, though)