Tutorial

I know there are lots of tools out there that automatically create BIN/CUE files - but most of them only by ripping the CD.

But I wanted to create an exact digital master, generated out of the original WAV files.

Introduction

Since most audio CD production companies only offer printing templates for closed, proprietary applications like 'Adobe InDesign', 'Adobe Photoshop', 'Corel Draw', etc. I thought it was time to release a printing template based on Free Software!

Here is a link to a layout template for creating a CD artwork (booklet, inlay, label, ...) for a classic CD jewel case - with the Open Source Desktop Publishing application "Scribus":

This HowTo describes how to make an audio CD in a way so that you can reproduce it exactly - even in years, and on different computer systems.
What can go wrong, and why am I spending time writing this tutorial?

(EDIT: CD production facilities usually won't handle TOC files, but might accept BIN/CUE images. I've also written an additional tutorial about creating a BIN/CUE audio CD image with GNU/Linux)

When I made the very first audio CD for the band I was playing in, I just burned the final WAVs onto an audio CD. No big deal, right?
Any CD burning application can do that... right?

Well, here's a summary of the lesson I've learned the hard way - and how to do it right...

As a sensitive and educated user, I didn't want to loose days of work due to a computer failure (disk crash, hardware dying, etc...), so I decided to automate zipping and uploading my ardour project files (*.ardour) to a remote server using secure copy (scp) over SSH and a small bash script.

Since I'm also keeping a TODO list and a notes textfile (TODO.txt, notes.txt), I add them to the project archive, too.

For our album "X marks the spot", I've encountered the problem that some images did not really have a lot of content free "space" around their edges. Unfortunately, this causes details to be cut off during printing, because it's necessary to have a so called "bleeds" to avoid white areas at the edge of the paper.

This tutorial explains a nice workaround to this problem...