I’m having an issue trying to burn a music CD for use in my (very old, I know I know) car. I’m running FedoraKDE (40) and Brasero, a Liteon brand external optical DVDRW drive, CD-R (TDK brand), and a Framework 16.

The issue I’m having seems to be that the blank disks(maybe?) aren’t recognized automatically by Fedora, when I pop a full commercially released CD in it’ll play/rip, but with a blank disk nothing happens, and I don’t know where to “save” the “image” of this album I’m creating in Brasero to get it on the disk.

Someone on a random linux forum told some other guy to run cdrecord -checkdrive which says my drive is at /dev/sr0 with a blank disk, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Do I choose sr0 as the place to save it? It says “something something overwrite” when I try which makes me wary, it seems it wants to overwrite “sr0” itself and either bork my drive or install, but maybe?

I’m positive it’s just something simple I’m missing, any help would be greatly appreciated and I can answer questions and run commands if needed (but I don’t actually have WIFI rn, so I’ll have to have the package for said command already.)

Thanks in advance.

Aha! I understand now. So, on Linux, everything is a file. Even Disk Drives, CDs, flash drives, etc. I think this may be the root of your confusion. Instead of new drive D:// popping up somewhat parallel to your C:// file system (as it would in Windows), it shows up inside your existing file system.

You were on the right path before. The cdrecord command you ran seems to have correctly told you the location of the CD in your file system (/dev/sr0) . I imagine this changes with distro and hardware, but I’m not sure because my CD burning days predate my Linux days. If you want to make sure that this is indeed the correct place to save the file, then run the command again with the CD removed. If it disappears, then you’ve got it.

The closest thing I’ve done is install raspberry OS to a flash drive, which often shows up as /dev/sd0, so it seems like you were very much on the right track. The /dev folder means “device”, so most hardware peripherals will have some kind of presence here.

Yes that is indeed what I seek, thank you!

Well so it seems it is on /dev/sr0, because I have found some help on burning the disk through CLI with cdrecord itself, and sox to convert the files to .cdr format. The disk is now “burning” (well, it sounds like it! We’ll see if it plays here shortly), but I would like to find out how to use brasero to do it.

For now though I can write a script to convert all the files in a given dir to .cdr and then auto burn them to the disk if this works though which ain’t too shabby.

Also, check out this article:

https://dev.to/softwaresennin/linux-directory-structure-simplified-a-comprehensive-guide-3012

It goes over basic folder structure for Linux so that you have a rough idea where something like C://Users/User/Program Files lives in it’s equivalent form on Linux.

Thanks this is super helpful! I’ll be saving this one to pdf for future reference too!

It looks like Brasero would handle all of that kind of Media Management stuff for you, so try it out before you reinvent the wheel.

Well that’s the thing, I still haven’t figured out how to make brasero actually do anything, but I have already written and tested my first version of my script and it’s burning my second disk now. On this test I’ve figured out another line I need to add to improve it (and make it clean up the .cdr files after itself.) So, unless I can find someone with better instructions on brasero than “just do it” it seems I’m stuck with reinvention.

Incidentally, is it better for me to call sudo inside the script for cdrecord -v or should I not use it inside and instead run sudo myscript for the whole thing?

I think Ideally you should be able to run it as you instead of root or sudo. I’m assuming you are needing sudo since you don’t have access to the burner as your user.

Do an “ls -lah” on your cd burner. I think you said it was /dev/sr0 so “ls -lah /dev/sr0” and see if it is owned by root:root or hopefully root:disk or something like that. The format is “user:group” so I’m hoping it is owned by a group that you can simply add your user to.

If it is owned by another group, you can just run “sudo usermod -aG disk user” replace disk with the group that shows on the ls command and user with your user.

If that burner is owned by root:root, there is a way to change that. But that gets very complicated. And I’m not sure its worth the effort for you unless you are wanting to learn more. Point 4.3 here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Udev

In which case to directly answer your question, I’d personally prefer to sudo the script instead of adding sudo in the script. But at the end of the day, I don’t think it matters too much for this specific use case.

Looks like root, I think. It says

brw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 11, 0 Aug 18 14:13 /dev/sr0

no “:” though oddly, so maybe I can run

sudo usermod -aG cdrom $USER?

Edit: looks like it throws the same error as not sudoing, wodim no write mode specified blah blah. It did add me to the cdrom group though. Although now it won’t work with sudo, how do I remove myself from the cdrom group?

Edit again: Wait, I got it working with another disk, the one I was just trying may have been too big to fit on the disk but throwing the same error as when I didn’t use sudo. Burning this one with sudo, will test again without when it finishes. Thankfully I have a stack of these disks lol I can do this all day.

Ok, still need sudo. Without sudo it just exits without writing to the disk. I guess what I thought was warnings is just standard incomprehensible readout, but yeah without sudo (or if the files are too big for the disk) it just exits and finishes out my script removing the .cdr files.

My bad thought it was printed as “user:group” and not “user group”.

When you add yourself to a group you need to either log out and log back in or reboot in order for it to take effect. So maybe next time you log in try it without sudo again.

hey, man. I’m sorry you felt like I was saying “just do it”. I’d be happy to help more, but I don’t have a CD ROM to test with. I just assumed the GUI would be more self explanatory. Like I said above, I’ve never had to burn a CD on Linux. Please remember that the Linux community is made of volunteers. Getting frustrated at them doesn’t really make them want to help, especially since I literally cannot help anymore than I have without a CD rom in my hands. If you want to ship one to me, I’d be happy to figure out Brasero and walk you through it. Since that is clearly unreasonable, remember that these forums are populated by well-intentioned people doing their best.

I mean it’s not your fault, that’s what the documentation for brasero says. It doesn’t tell me how to “select where to save it” or whatever their exact verbiage is however, and the hard part is even getting people to understand what my issue is. You may not have been able to answer my main question but you helped me work around it, sorta, and for that I am grateful. I just wish the documentation and every comment helping didn’t just say “download brasero” (which I clearly have already done as per my question) or “use this link which says ‘brasero: just do it.’”

Tbf I’m sure most people don’t bother to try and solve things themselves before posting, but I’ve already seen the brasero instructions that were linked because I did, and it still doesn’t tell me what I need to select to get the files on the disk, it just tells me that I need to select something. Again I think selecting /dev/sr0 will replace and overwrite sr0 as per the warning, so I do not think it is the correct answer, and so far nobody has given any alternatives as to what the answer might be, instead offering suggestions on how to download brasero or that darn link again.

And as to reinventing the wheel:

Now I’m trying to get my script to run cdrecord -checkdrive and pipe that answer into my script, the damn thing is now on /dev/sr1!

oh! I’m more of a debian guy than a fedora guy which is why this is a bit out of my depth, but /dev/sr1 is just the equivalent of the E:// drive (that is, for whatever reason, you OS mounted it as a new disk). Perhaps this means it burned successfully?

Unfortunately, yeah, not all documentation can cover the entirety of Linux design from the bottom up and back in this era, Linux was used almost exclusively by academics at universities. As such, the documentation was never written for a general user. It has come a very long way since then, but back when cd roms were common, it was a thousand times worse. Also, YouTube didnt work on Linux at all, so you had to be really committed to fuck around with it.

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