Open Source applications: Recorder

There’s no good GTK burning application. Well, at least for me there isn’t. I don’t know what it is, but neither Brasero, nor Gnomebaker or Nautilus CD Burning work well with my Philips CD burner. Brasero just hangs at 0%, then throws an error and spits out the CD, which has become a coaster. Last time I tried GnomeBaker it just kept on crashing. And Nautilus CD burner always throws an error, saying that burning has failed, even when it hasn’t. In the end, I just gave up and installed k3b, which is of course a Qt-application, but at least it works well.

Enter: Recorder. As you might know, I use Arch Linux as my main OS. Arch users are pretty knowledgeable (I don’t include myself 😉 ), as shown by this post:

Hi,

The last week, on my spare time, i coded a small frontend in pygtk for cdrecord, mkisofs and growisofs. It’s based on PyBurn by Judd Vinet. Just a small utility.

False modesty. Recorder is fast, lightweight, looks good, and works well. Sometimes. More on that later.

Recorder, a GTK burning utility

I haven’t tested burning to DVD, because I don’t have a DVD lying around, but have tested writing an audio cd and writing an image (Slitaz) to disk. Novice users could be intimidated by the text scrolling past when it’s burning a CD, or by the need to enter the path to your CD drive yourself in Preferences, but autodetection of drives is in the works. Another downside is that, unless you’re an Arch user, you’ll have to compile it from source. However, it’s not a large program and the dependencies are listed at the website, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Those are the downsides. The upsides, for me, is that it’s very light (the source tarball measures only 29,8 kB, which is ridiculously small for burning software), and the dev, who goes by the name of icrave, welcomes any input and frequently adds features that are requested on the Arch forum.

At the moment, icrave isn’t really sure if he should put Recorder on GnomeFiles, wondering if it’s stable enough. Unfortunately, I’d have to say no. While many Arch users have had no problem with Recorder, burning an iso didn’t work well for me. I thought I burned the Slitaz iso just fine, but upon booting my pc speaker became nuts and almost deafened me before I could reboot. Next time, at a slower speed, X wouldn’t start. I suspected the Slitaz iso, but after burning it with Nautilus CD burner (which gave me the familiar error message), I’m typing this from a fully working Slitaz live Cd, and I’m forced to conclude that Recorder was at fault here.

Fast readers of my blog may have noticed that the first draft of this article was much more positive. My bad, I should have tested the burned iso before I started raving. I still think Recorder has a lot of potential, and I’ll keep an eye on it in the future.

San