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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Standard CD creation library.
From:       Michael Bedy <mjbedy () mediaone ! net>
Date:       2001-07-29 6:57:36
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Hi, I've been thinking about/working on this and wondered if this would be
appropriate for kdelibs or maybe kdemultimedia at some point when it's
more usable.

================

I was thinking about applications that could make use of a CD burner in
KDE, and realized that there are several potentially useful things that
could be done. A few examples include:

   1) Your standard EasyCD, Nero looking application.

   2) An integrated into Konqurer ioslaveish thing that allows users to
construct a CD via dragging and dropping. (a la Win XP, although I had
been thinking of this before I saw XP :-)

   3) A KDE Media Player (or whatever) that slices and dices and,
of course, burns audio CDs created from mp3/ogg/whatever painlessly.

   4) A backup program that can archive to multiple CDs if necessary.

   5) I'm sure there are other good ideas.

Anyway, the hard(est) part of all this is that actual interaction with the
hardware. On Linux one is pretty much forced to implement the horrible
hack of parsing cdrecord's output. It can be done, but it's a real pain to
get right.

So, my proposal is to implement the horrible hack once, give it a clean
interface, and let the UI portions of CD burning programs be implemented
separately. This also would allow, as a special bonus, the implementation
of other "drivers" to the same interface. For example, IDE burners on
FreeBSD cannot use cdrecord, and must use burncd instead. Or someone might
someday create an actual library for controling CD burners without going
through a seperate program.

I currently have a very preliminary implementation that allows for the
burning of audio CDs. It barely works, and will fall over dead if anything
bad happens. However, it works well enough to convince me that it can be
done. I have the vauge outlines of the design for the rest of it in my
head and will continue to work on it if you think it is useful. It should
take a relatively short amount of time to finish the basic skeleton, but
it will take a while to flesh it out, including error handling, etc.

The goal of this library is to make burning a CD from a KDE application as
simple as possible. Without the ugly work of talking to the required
programs, creating such an application should be much easier.

Of course to implement and test the library will require a program that
uses it. So it's likely that at least program #1 will come out of the
implementation of the library.

  Thanks,
    - Mike

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