July 17, 2005

• itunes, surely.
• iTunes, definitely. Best damn music player out there, and great for burning all kinds of music formats.
• I third iTunes. Just create a playlist, dump your songs in there, and then click the "Burn" icon in the toolbar. Just a note: your CD may be 700MB in size but that doesn't mean it will hold 700MB of mp3's. When they are decompressed into the CD format they are much, much larger.
• Ah. Caveat: Since I upgraded my tower to include a burner, iTunes doesn't recognize it. I need to turn things into .wavs or .aiffs before I burn them with toast. Unless there's some way to convert things inside of iTunes that I don't know...
• iTunes, maybe.
• OS X 10.2.8? Get 10.3 at least - please! It's a vast improvement, and now that 10.4 is out, you can probably pick up a second hand installer disc for very little.
• Threeday: The barrier isn't the program cost, but the computer cost. I run what I can, and when I can afford a better computer, I'll leap to Osx10.4 (or OS XV 29.44, which is sure to be out by the time I can afford a new computer).
• I too would love to have a way to burn audio cds without relying on itunes for my mac. But I haven't had any luck finding such a program either.
• This looks like it might do the trick. Personally, I'd work on getting the burner to work.
• Won't Toast do this for you if you drag an music file onto the Audio tab? What version of that are you running?
• iTunes seems to be the favorite. I've never used OS X but the following should also work for you. If you are comfortable with a command line, fire up a shell and try this: Convert mp3 file to wav file using mpg321 for OS X:

  mpg321 -w output_name.wav input_name.mp3

  Do this for each of the audio files you want to write to CD. You can prefix the track with a two digit number to specify in which order they should be written to the CD. You can then write all the files to the CD at once using cdrecord for OS X. You'd want to use "cdrecord --scanbus" to find your CD-RW drive, and something like:

  cdrecord dev=X,Y,Z speed=24 -tao -audio -pad *.wav

  to write the audio wav files you created to CD-R. (Replace "dev=X,Y,Z" with the three numbers returned by the scanbus option. On the other hand, OS X may have a different mechanism for communicating with the CD-RW drive, so check the manual pages and remember YMMV.) That's basically how I normally write audio CDs using GNU/Linux and since OS X is a Unix it should work there, too. You can get mpg321 and cdrecord for OS X from Fink.
• Thanks Nomen, I'll give that a shot. You get the BEST ANSWER!
• You may just want to try burning a CD anyway, if you haven't already. My iTunes refuses to acknowledge that I have that drive in the lefthand column, but will cheerfully use it when I go to actually burn a CD.
• You should look here Accelerate Your Mac Drive compatibility database. You might be able to fix it with a drive hack called Patchburn (http://www.patchburn.de/download.html). It can convince your mac that your drive is supported in iApps with some drive models not natively supported.
• Even if you have to use Toast to burn the audio CD, you can still use iTunes to convert your mp3s back to aiff or wav format. In 'Preferences,' change the default setting for importing music to AIFF, select the songs you wish to convert, and then under the 'Advanced' menu choose the 'Convert Selection to AIFF' menu item. Voila. Quality may be crap converting lossy back to lossless, but you'll have files suitable for CD players.
• 10.3 is much faster on older computers than 10.2.8. So I'd definitely upgrade if I were you.
• A search on versiontracker.com for cd burner turns up some possibilties.
• I agree with Mare. I'm currently on a Pismo (G3-400 PowerBook) that I just upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 and it's much snappier. Plus, there some apps I want to put on it that are minimum 10.3, which seems to be getting more and more common.
• Patchburn got my outboard burner to show up; it's free and it's worth a try ... here it is.
• 1. go to preferences menu from the itunes main pull down menu. click on importing and select your preferred format: aiff or wav. 2. make sure you know where your iTunes playlists will be created on your drive. 3. drop songs into iTunes. iTunes will now import them as wav or aiff files (depending on what you selected) and will organize them into your corresponding iTunes music folder (the location of which i mentioned that you should know. though you can always do a simple search in finder to figure that out). voila -- grab songs from the iTunes music folder and drag them to Toast. good luck.
• I burn my CD's with Vice Grips™ and a mini blowtorch from the gas station. Works great.
• Thanks folks! MoFi works!
• js, I assume you will share with your close simian relatives? Remember, yo' mama is in the same situation you are...
• I found a quick-&-dirty command-line perl script on the web (and forgot where I got it; if the author reads this, thanks). It'll convert a whole directory of mp3s at once. I copy it in the directory of convertible mp3s and do "perl convert.pl" (no quotes) and it outputs a bunch of .wav files numbered 1.wav, 2.wav, and so on. If you use mpg321 instead of mpg123 you'll need to edit this script to change that, and if you want to use the .aiff instead of .wav format you'll have to change that; all of this is pretty straightforward and you wind up with a script that's a hell of a lot of easier and quicker than converting a bunch of mp3 files one at a time by hand.(And if somebody actually knows enough enough perl to make it this even easier to use I'd appreciate it.) snip below --- #!/usr/bin/perl my $dir = "."; opendir DH, $dir or die "Can't open $dir: $!"; $count2=1; while ($name = readdir DH) { next unless $name =~ /\.mp3$/; $wav="$count2.wav"; print "$wav\n"; system "mpg123 -w $wav \"$name\""; $count2++; }
• To do the same at the BASH command line:

  count=0; for wavfile in *.wav ; do let count=$count+1; mp3name=$count.wav ; mpg123 -w $mp3name "$wavfile" ; done

  If I have to convert a bunch of files, be they sound or video, I usually just type something like that at the command line. Saves so much time for large batches.
• Heh. It's official: I'm an idiot. On second look I noticed that the command string I posted tries to convert the WAV files in the current directory to MP3 files using mpg123 (which cannot do that.) That's what I get for posting to Monkeyfilter when I really should have been sleeping. Anyway, this is the correct BASH command string to do what the Perl script does:

  count=0; for mp3file in *.mp3 ; do let count=$count+1; wavfile=$count.wav ; mpg123 -w $wavfile "$mp3file" ; done

• MonkeyFilter: It's official: I'm an idiot. MonkeyFilter: I assume you will share with your close simian relatives? See, it's possible in any thread. Am I hot today or what? MonkeyFilter: Thanks folks! Just put your money in the basket.