"Stephen B. Salai" <bsalai@rochester.rr.com> writes:

> I got a player for cd's and mp3's for Christmas, and am trying to use
> cdrecord to put a bunch of mp3's on a cd. 

Before cdrecord, you need to use mkisofs (or something similar) to
create an ISO filesystem image containing the mp3 files.

> Everything goes fine, but the player doesn't find anything to play. Has
> anyone done this? the cdrecord man page isn't helpful.

I got one of my nephews a Memorex MP3/CD player, and what I found was:

1) as soon as the player encounters a non-mp3 file in its search
   (which happens in alphabetical order), it stops searching the
   current directory.

2) It stops after searching about 20 directories.

3) The player lists the albums/songs in alphabetical order according
   to directory, then filename.

I ended up doing the following:

1) Create a scratch directory on my hard drive, and put each album
   in its own directory immediately under that directory (some MP3
   ripping software further categorizes by grouping directories for
   albums by the same artist/group under a higher level directory with
   the group's name, but that means a larger total number of
   directories, which causes the Memorex player to miss some albums at
   the end).

2) Make sure each song's filename begins with a number indicating its
   sequence on the album, eg:

    01 First Song
    02 Second Song
    ...

   This will assure that the songs play in the correct sequence on the
   CD player.

3) Similarly, if you want the albums to be sequenced in any particular
   order, number the directory names as well.

4) If you have any non-mp3 files on the CD, make sure they have names
   that place them alphabetically *after* any MP3 file, or directory
   containing MP3 files.

   For example, I like to burn my CDs with an AUTORUN.INF, an m3u (MP3
   playlist), and a small application that will startup the designated
   m3u player on an MS Windows machine when the CD is inserted. If I
   just left the directory names as Artist-Album, the AUTORUN.INF
   would be found by the MP3/CD player before most (or all) of the
   directories, and the rest of the MP3 directories would be
   ignored. However, if the directory names all start with numbers
   ("01 Artist-Album"), They appear in the listing before the non-MP3
   files, and all directories/files are recognized.

5) Create the ISO image using mkisofs. I create mine with both Joliet
   and Rock Ridge extensions, to maximize the number of systems that
   will recognize the long filenames. From the toplevel scratch
   directory on the hard disk, I use:

     mkisofs -pad -J -R -o image.iso .

6) Burn with cdrecord, eg:


     cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cd0d image.iso