6. Data CDs

	Note
	This section is a work in progress, you're looking at initial, very sparse version.

With increasing popularity of CD/MP3 players burning data CDs for listening purposes become practical. The advantage is definitely being able to squeeze ten times more music onto one CD (a very approximate figure).

First I would recommend the filename cleanup steps outlined at the beginning of this document. Conversion to WAV is, obviously, not needed here. To normalize MP3 files without losing quality by conversions, use mp3gain. This program is available from http://www.maazl.de/project/mp3/mp3gain.html or http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/ (but this second site seems to contain Windows-oriented version). You'd need to issue the command:

mp3gain -r -c *.mp3

As far as burning is concerned, MP3 data CD-s are just a standard data CD's (ISO9660) with MP3 files on it. All MP3-CD players I know accept CD-s with directories in them, and I usually burn CD with Joliet extension and they work just fine. So to burn such a CD under linux, you first need to create an ISO image an then burn it on the CD as in the example below:

mkisofs -J -o /tmp/mymp3s.iso /home/greg/mp3s/
cdrecord dev=1,0,0 speed=16 -eject /tmp/mymp3s.iso

That's it!