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...