1. Introduction

This mini-HOWTO was created because of my experience with burning music CDs and lack of some specific information about sound normalization on the Internet. I usually burn music CDs as a mix - different songs from different sources.Very often volume level between songs varies greatly. This is the first obstacle. Second, many of the files on the Internet are not CD-compatible (16 bit, stereo, 44.1 kHz) and have to be converted. There are many programs to burn music CDs from MP3 files, and many of them do the conversion transparently. But I haven't seen a single tool that also normalizes the volume, so that's why I worked out my own CD-burning recipe.

If you you just want to make a CD filled with music, and not be bothered with all of the details, I have good news for you: Kees Cook (<kees@outflux.net>) put together a tool based on this HOWTO, which automates all of the tasks outlined here. His program can be obtained from http://outflux.net/unix/software/mp3cd/. Thanks, Kees!

This HOWTO is just about one thing - putting MP3 music on a CD, so that you can listen to it. For in-depth information about MP3 files, please look at The Linux MP3 HOWTO by Phil Kerr, located at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-HOWTO.html. For information about CD creation in general as well as CD burners, refer to CD-Writing-HOWTO by Winfried Trümper, available at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html.

I'm assuming you wish to burn a CD with the collection of songs you obtained from different sources, all varying quality, but you want to get the best-sounding CD possible. This mini-HOWTO outlines the steps that may help you.