Description:
K3b is a CD and DVD burning application for Linux systems optimized for KDE. It provides a comfortable user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD. While the experienced user can take influence in all steps of the burning process the beginner may find comfort in the automatic settings and the reasonable K3b defaults which allow a quick start. The actual burning in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord, cdrdao, and growisofs.

Author: Sebastian Trueg & Dev. Team
Homepage: http://www.k3b.org/

App rating details:
Total votes: 0
Overall rating: 0

How'd this get started?:

Sebastian Trueg: "It was some nice (or maybe not, it's quite a while ago so I cannot remember) day in 1998 and it had been a while that I tested my first SuSE installation. Meanwhile Windows was running again. For some reason I made another try and started to use Linux on a day by day basis. At that point we were using QT 1.4 in a project at the university. It was my first big programming experience and I thought: 'Wow, these Trolltech guys really know their stuff!' (The only thing I tried before was MFC and everyone who knows the MFC and QT knows how it feels to have their first working window in 5 minutes. That brought me to KDE at home and I began playing around. That was basicly everything I did on Linux: playing around, trying this, forcing that to work (in 1998 a SuSE installation did definitely not work out-of-the box. So I also tried writing CDs. Mainly audio CDs. Well, on the one hand there was cdrecord and on the other hand there were xcdroast, koncd, and kreatecd... but I wanted to make a few clicks and have my mp3 files burned on a CD. So I thought: I have a lot of spare time and nothing to do (to be honest: I wasn't to eager to go to the university), why not try it by myself. And I did. I started with the Audio Project and mpg123 (K3b made a weird call to mpg123 and cdrecord in the early years). Somehow I stumbled across Sourceforge and since it was free (I did not know much about open-source and the big community at that time) I decided to put K3b online. Since it's fun I had already increased the version number for myself. That's why the first version of K3b was 0.3.1 or something like that. It wasn't long until I had my first users and positive feedback. I just kept going, made the change from the sourceforge cvs to kdemultimedia (just for a few days) and then to kdeextragear. And here I am, spending way too much time on K3b and way too little on my studies. No, seriously: it's a lot of fun."

What do you think are its best features?:

"Since I started K3b mostly for the Audio CD I think this is also one of it's most important features: burning from all kinds of audio sources (well, at least the current cvs supports nearly all formats that make sense) on-the-fly to an audio CD. Apart from that I think what makes K3b unique is it's combination of easy handling (default settings and Automatic modes) and advanced features. I try to give every parameter it's perfect place in the GUI. There is even one feature in K3b which I think is not even standard for Windows apps: K3b copies multisession CDs, including Enhanced Audio CDs (second session consists for example a music video or multimedia features). And: most other GUIs on Linux 'just' call cdrecord to get their information about devices and media. K3b has it's own device handling library which takes care of everything except for the actual writing. That includes detecting the devices and their capabilities, reading the device type, the table of contents, CD-Text, and so on. It even replaced readcd since that lacks features I needed in K3b. Having this library enables K3b to handle a lot of situations better since it always knows exactly what kind of device and media it is dealing with and never has to parse output from some external application (which I don't like)."


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