The CD-Rchive Handbook : Audio Overview

Contents

## Audio CD Overview

There is room on a standard 640 MB CDR disc for approximately 74 minutes of digital audio sound.
CD-Rchive provides the ability via cdda2wav to lift tracks from existing audio CDs and save or pipe them as .wav files.
CD-Rchive can then write these tracks to CD via cdrecord.
Alternately you can record audio to .wav or .au files via your sound card line in jack from whatever source, using a recording program.
I favour Krecord, even though I do not use KDE.
These files can be specified in CD-Rchive and written to disc.
There are two methods available:-
2 stage recording
The 2 stage approach, record the .wav files then write to CD, is recommended because it is the safest.
It is also the one which can make a proper copy of the source CD, with individual tracks.
This method is essential if your CD Writer is your only SCSI CD-ROM device or the only one which supports digital extraction. This was my situation until recently.
(Just be sure to set your Source device to the same as your Target device)
On the fly recording
This method is obviously quicker, taking half the time of 2 stage recording. It requires that you have a digital extraction capable SCSI CD-ROM (physical SCSI or emulated) for the source CD as well as your CD Writer.
The method used in CD-Rchive is to pipe the output from cdda2wav direct to cdrecord.
This has a consequence you may not have considered.
As cdda2wav delivers the tracks in a continuous stream, what you will end up with is a CD with only ONE track. All the tracks from the source CD will be there, but not individually accessible.
This may not be of any importance to you, in which case this is a fast method of copying an audio CD.
Extracting audio from CD