What is Gnome Toaster?

Gnome Toaster is a cd creation suite for Linux and FreeBSD (testers wanted!). Thought to be as user-friendly as possible it lets you create cd recordables with just a few simple mouse clicks. Create your CDs by simply dragging the desired contents onto it's display window. Although certainly the various programs available for Windows have been an example how people expect an easy-to-use cd creation suit to be, Gnometoaster is trying to do things differently in various ways. Not only can Gnometoaster write mp3 files to a disc on-the-fly, it can also encode them. Besides mp3, almost all other common file formats can be used by just specifying their respecting commandline players as a "plugin" in Gnometoaster's unique Filetype registry. This is how Gnometoaster gains maximum use of the immensely large collection of tools available to the Linux community, combining them all into a single, easy to use interface for a specific purpose.

Although not all of Gnometoaster's intended functionality has been implemented yet (but we're rapidly approaching this state now) ,it already is a powerful authoring and copying tool for audio, data and mixed mode cds. The program includes a Filesystem editor, providing a comfortable desktop for creating data cds without limitations concerning the directory structure of your CD. Individual files can be added or deleted the way you want, which is a very different approach to e.g. xcdroast or gcombust, two other common cd recording frontends for Unix. There is also a track editor for arranging audio tracks on a cd. Audiotracks can currently be taken from other audio cds, wav, mp3 files and whatever happens to be configured in your Filetype registry., e.g. I've successfully tested recording midi files using timidity as a backend. All the user has got to do for creating a cd is to drop whatever contents he wants to be stored on his cd to either the track editor or the filesystem editor. You can use the built-in file and device manager as a source for your drop operations as well as any Gnome-compliant file manager (e.g. Gnome Midnight-Commander).

With Gnome Toaster's Filetypemanager, you can convert virtually any Filetype to it's appropriate tracktype within Gnome Toaster. All you need is a filter program which takes your data as input and outputs the raw track data. For example, mpg123 will do the job for mp3 files. Gnome Toaster is even preconfigured for that one. Record wav, au, voc, whatever comes to your mind using the sox sound converter as a filter to produce just the format needed for cd recording.

A rather unique feature of Gnometoaster is the direct conversion of audio tracks into mp3 files within an ISO9660 project. This way, creating a sampler cd containing your favourite audio tracks as mp3 files is just a matter of a few drag and drop actions. The encoder to be used can be configured freely. Gnometoaster is preconfigured to support the creation of .wav and .mp3 files but ogg vorbis support has succesfully been tested and should be easy to set up.


Supported features:



Some Screenshots:

The following screenshots come from the Gnome-version of Gnometoaster, that is: It has been compiled with Gnome support enabled. Remember that you do not actually need Gnome to run Gnometoaster. The program will,however,look significantly better if you do so. The Gtk-Theme used for those screenshots is called ThinIce.Itīs available from http://gtk.themes.org. Please notice that I do not update these Screenshots regularly with each development snapshot. The actual program might thus look a bit different to what you see here.

The Filesystem Editor of Gnome Toaster...


...and the Track Editor


This is Gnometoasterīs preferences menu. What you see here is the page responsible for ISO Filesystem options ...


... and finally this is Gnometoaster's recording panel .


GNOME TOASTER IS FREE SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTED UNDER THE GPL, GNU-PUBLIC-LICENSE, A COPY OF WHICH CAN BE FOUND WITHIN THE DISTRIBUTION ARCHIVE. GENERALLY THIS MEANS THAT YOU ARE ALLOWED TO MAKE AS MANY COPIES OF THIS PRODUCT AS YOU LIKE. YOU MAY REDISTRIBUTE THE ARCHIVE. YOU CAN CHANGE THE SOFTWARE AND REDISTRIBUTE THE CHANGED VERSION AS LONG AS IT IS CLEARLY VISIBLE THAT IT IS NOT THE ORIGINAL PROGRAM. MODIFICATIONS TO THE SOFTWARE SHOULD, HOWEVER, GENERALLY BE SUBMITTED TO THE EMAIL ADDRESS BELOW. IF THEY ARE USEFUL, THEY'LL THEN BE INTEGRATED INTO THE MAIN GNOME TOASTER DISTRIBUTION. THIS HELPS KEEPING THE WORLD EASY.


Please submit any mails, patches, informations, hints, ... to A.Eckleder@bigfoot.com.
Please don't send files larger than ~400kb without prior asking.

Bookmark http://gnometoaster.rulez.org/ to stay informed about new developments concerning Gnome Toaster.

©1999 by Computer Interactive.