Arson is a KDE frontend to various CD burning, and ripping tools. It supports burning audio, data, and video (VCD) through the use of a number of outside tools. Wav, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, SHN, and FLAC audio formats are supported, as are bin/cue and ISO-9660 CD images. Arson also supports writing CD-TEXT and auto-tagging of MP3s using ID3v2. Note that Arson is merely a front-end. Separate programs, such as cdrecord or cdrdao for burning and cdda2wav or cdparanoia for ripping are required. Since various features of external programs are used for various tasks, you are strongly encouraged to also install all packages that arson Recommends. This will produce a reasonably full- featured install. Because of patent issues, no MP3 encoders are currently available in Debian. It is recommended that you instead use the free Ogg Vorbis format for lossy encoding of audio data. If this does not suit your needs, you will need to provide a local copy of lame or bladeenc. SHN encoding and reading also requires external tools currently unavailable in Debian.

It is typically easiest to use one of the GUI programs to burn a data or audio CD. These are typically graphical front ends to the command line programs cdrecord. My favorite for ease of use and creating / copying CD's is X-CdRoast. Data CD's require that a file system image be generated prior to burning. This is typically the ISO-9660 CD standard. (And there are many non-standard variants and extensions.) CD's can be burned in DAO (Disk At Once) or TAO (Track At Once) mode. The only reason to use DAO mode is when burning audio CD's. Audio CD's burned TAO will have 2 second gaps between tracks. If one is copying an entire CD, TAO mode will introduce these 2 second gaps if they do not already exist. DAO mode uses a raw CD access mode and can avoid these gaps between tracks. DVDs allow for greater storage and also support additional formats for video. This tutorial will cover audio and data CD and DVD copying, generation and burning software applications. Rip or burn a data backup CD or DVD on linux with ease.