Free/Open-source Optical Disk Authoring Software

Optical disc authoring software, most commonly known as CD/DVD burning application is computer software for authoring optical discs such as CD-ROMs and DVDs. An optical disc recorder is necessary to use such software.

Creating an optical disc typically involves first making an optical disc image with a full file system designed for the optical disc, and then actually burning the image to the disc. Many programs create the disk image and burn in one bundled application, such that end-users do not even know the distinction.

Though most Linux distributions have cdrtools (standard open source optical disc authoring software) installed, there are other excellent and easy-to-use CD/DVD burning programs that are available for Linux.

Here are some of the finest free/open-source optical disk authoring software:

Brasero
Brasero is a free disc-burning program for Unix-like systems, which serves as a graphical front-end (using GTK+) to cdrtools, growisofs, and (optionally) libburn. One of the lead developers, Luis Medinas, is a contributor for other projects such as Muine (audio player) and Beagle (search tool), both written in C# using Mono. He is a Gentoo Developer involved in the Gentoo Gnome Team, and maintains miscellaneous applications for the GNOME project.[1] The software itself has been reviewed in a few places.


AcetoneISO
AcetoneISO is a disk image manipulator for GNU/Linux.

It is a feature-rich and complete software application to manage CD/DVD images. For example it can Mount typical proprietary images formats of the Windows world and do plenty of other things.

It uses common open source tools to achieve its goals such as FUSEISO.


Bashburn
Bashburn is no more than a Terminal User Interface (TUI) frontend based of the CD burning shell script called BashBurn for Linux; this originally does not have the best eye-candy CD-burning UI, nevertheless, MyBashBurn uses dialog boxes/functions which draws (using ncurses) windows onto the screen. MyBashBurn dialog boxes offer good functionality, and has very good capabilities of automatically finding dependencies and auto detecting devices CD/DVD RW. In short, do not reinvent the wheel - just let MyBashBurn do what you want it to do.

MyBashBurn can burn data Cd's, music Cd's, multisession Cd's. It can burn and create ISO files. It can burn bin/cue files, create mp3s, oggs and flac files. Supports burning DVD-images and data DVDs, and other funny options. Also makes use of advanced and extensive regular expressions for the control of the capabilities of backend applications to burn and create audio files. MyBashBurn depends on cdrecord and other backend applications, so basically if your writing device works with it, MyBashBurn will work flawlessly.

cdrdao
cdrdao records audio or data CD-Rs in Disk-At-Once mode based on a textual description of the CD contents. The cdrdao program runs from the command line and has no graphical user interface, except for third-party ones such as K3b (Linux) or XDuplicator (windows).

cdrdao is cross-platform software and is reported to work on FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, UnixWare, and Mac OS X.

Exact Audio Copy, an advanced CD-ripping software package, relies upon CDRDAO code in order to provide CD-burning functionality.


GnomeBaker
GnomeBaker is part of the GNOME desktop environment.

The GnomeBaker offers many features for authoring CDs that surpass the basic Nautilus CD/DVD burning capabilities. Among these are the possibility to create an audio cd from existing sound files and other useful things.

An overview of available functions is given here:
* Create data CDs.
* Blank RW disks.
* Burn DVDs.
* Copy data CDs.
* Copy audio CDs.
* Support multisession burning.
* Record to and burn from existing CD ISO images.
* Can burn via SCSI and ATAPI on Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Basically if cdrecord works, then GnomeBaker will work.
* Drag and drop to create data CDs (including drag and drop to/from the Nautilus file manager).
* Create audio CDs from existing WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg files.
* Integrate with GConf for storage of application settings.


Graveman
Graveman is a free software CD burning tool for Linux. It is technically a GTK+ front-end for cdrecord, mkisofs, readcd, sox, flac, dvd+rw-format, dvd+rw-tools and cdrdao.

Currently, Graveman supports the following:
* creating audio CDs
* creating data CDs and DVDs
* recording to and from ISO images
* CD copying
* erasing rewritable CDs and DVDs
* burning multisession CDs


K3b
K3b (from KDE Burn Baby Burn) is a CD and DVD authoring application for the KDE desktop for Unix-like computer operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or wodim, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.

K3b was voted LinuxQuestions.org's Multimedia Utility of the Year (2006) by the majority (70%) of voters.

As is the case with most KDE applications, K3b is written in the C++ programming language and uses the Qt GUI toolkit. Released under the GNU General Public License, k3b is free software.