CD Authoring

As of version 0.9, Bandcrash supports authoring audio CDs for use with full-disc CD imaging tools. This is primarily for simplifying on-demand manufacturing with e.g. Kunaki, but it’s also useful for simplifying DIY CD replication.

When generating CDDA output, Bandcrash will generate the following files in the cdda directory:

  • album.bin: The raw audio track (16-bit 44100 stereo little-endian)

  • album.cue: a CUE file for use with standard disc-at-once burning software (e.g. cdrdao, ImgBurn, and many others)

  • kunaki.cue: a CUE file in Kunaki’s proprietary(?) format

  • tracklist.tsv: a tabbed-separated value file with useful information for importing into other places (such as creating album art)

Here are some things to keep in mind when using these authoring files.

Verifying playback

The ffplay tool from FFmpeg can be used to ensure that the audio is correct. You can play the album audio with the following command:

ffplay --format pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ch_layout stereo album.bin

Alternately, you can load it into something like Audacity by importing it as raw data set to 16-bit, 44100Hz, little-endian stereo:

Importing the raw audio into Audacity

Kunaki uploads

When uploading to Kunaki, use the “ISO and CUE file” option. Kunaki is being imprecise here, as an .iso is a particular kind of a .bin but not all .bins are .isos. Further, Kunaki has what appears to be their own proprietary and undocumented .cue format, rather than using the standard cue sheet format.

In any case, when uploading, use album.bin for the ISO and kunaki.cue for the CUE.

cdrdao

While the CDDA standard and most tools expect little-endian (also called LSB) audio, cdrdao expects everything to be big-endian (aka MSB, sometimes called “Motorola”). Thus, when you burn a disc, you’ll need to specify the --swap option, for example:

cdrdao writecd --device /dev/sr0 --swap album.cue

While the .cue format explicitly specifies the endianness of the file (using BINARY and MOTOROLA for little and big endian, respectively), cdrdao’s parser ignores this.

ImgBurn

The .bin and .cue file work without any extra effort. Point it to the .cue.