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LARS

How To Use It

Requirements
  • cdrecord (find it on http://www.freshmeat.net/).
  • mpg123 (find it on http://www.freshmeat.net/).
  • CDR or CDRW drive that works under your OS.
  • Your cdrom device and/or scsi drivers must be accessible by the user running Lars. You might have to change permissions on the your cdrom device or run Lars as the root user.
After downloading You must first uncompress Lars with the following command:

tar xvzf lars-0.99.tar.gz

Compiling Simply cd into the lars directory and type:

make

Running To start Lars type:

./lars

After that follow the following steps:

1. Click the Select button to select the mp3's you want to burn. You can click on the Parent button or the name of a dir to go up/down a dir structure. Clicking on a file with .mp3 as an extension will add it to the files to burn. Clicking on "add all" will add all mp3's from the directory into your selected mp3's. If you want to force Lars to break for a second cd you can click on the Add Break button. If you'd like to remove a song from the list just click on it. If you have too many song to fill a cd, Lars will automatically put a CD break in while it's burning.

2. Lars creates very big .wav files from your mp3's before burning them so it needs probably about 800 megs of disk space (to be safe). You can tell Lars where to store these temp files by clicking on the Temp button. If you don't pick anything it will store them in /tmp.

3. Select your CDR/CDRW off the drive list. If it says "No CDR/CDRW's Found" then either you don't have cdrecord installed or it doesn't have permission to access /dev/sg* or /dev/sr* (depending on if you run Linux 2.4 or 2.2 or FreeBSD or whatever Unix you have). It could also mean that the cdrecord program is not in your $PATH.

4. Next select your drive speed. If you have an 8x cdwriter select 8x. I'm not sure what speed it will pick if you do default. On my newer CD recorder with the latest cdrecord and 2.6.x Linux kernel it picks the fastest speed the drive will do. A long time ago I think it picked 1x which was very slow. NOTE: you can enter any number you like in here by clicking on the text area and typing a number.

5. Lastly select your CD size. 700MB (80 minutes) is a standard disk these days. A few years ago the biggest discs were usually only 650MB (74 minute). NOTE: You can enter any number you like in here bye clicking on the text area and typing a number.

6. Choose normalization if you like. This normalization function is still being worked on. Currently it takes about 13 minutes to normalize a 5 minute song. However the combination of normalization and compression that it does can make old recordings sound a lot move alive. Read the FAQ for more info.

7. Press the Start button to start the processes :)

8. When Lars is done writing to a cd it will erase all the .wav files and start working on the next songs. When Lars is ready to burn the next cd it will wait until you push the Continue button. Make sure you have a fresh CD in the drive.

9. Lars will leave a songlist.txt file in your temp directory with a list of the CD's and what songs are on them.