Need a way to stream audio CDs directly from ISOs without converting first to MP3s

[Alan_152]

Here's the situation I'm facing: my church has a large archive of audio CDs from years of recording our weekly services and Sunday school sessions. We would like to make them available on our web site.

Right now, we convert each CD to MP3s and offer them as downloadable podcasts and as streamed audio. They can be seen at http://gracecomm.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=35&Itemid=50 . However, converting them to MP3 takes a long time, and yields both single-track and multi-track podcasts.

What we would like to do is stream directly from the ISO file. Does anybody have a recommendation on how to do this? TIA.

[Steven Schweda]

> What we would like to do is stream directly
> from the ISO file.

What "ISO" file? You probably can extract
the raw CD audio data from a CD, or from an
image file which would be used to produce an
audio CD, but it will be uncompressed, hence
such files will be much larger than the
corresponding MP3 files. And who will be
expecting the data in that form?

> [...] converting them to MP3 takes a long
> time [...]

So you want to do it on the fly, every time
someone asks for a particular file? Does
that make any sense? Or does no file ever
get requested twice?

> and yields both single-track and
> multi-track podcasts.

I assume that it yields whatever you specify
when you do the conversion. Isn't that
pretty much your choice?

Knowing nothing about how you do the MP3
conversion, I'd guess that what you really
need is a more automated method of doing that
conversion. But if you can explain more
clearly what the actual problem is, rather
than asking how to implement what may be a
sub-optimal solution for that problem, you
might get better advice.

[Alan_152]

I have approximately 1000 audio cds, each of them with 1 or more tracks, from the last 10 years of sermons, sunday school presentations, etc. It takes about 4 hours to take each CD, rip each track to an MP3 with Roxio, combine the seperate MP3s to a single MP3 file with another program, put it on the streaming server, and associate a link on the web server to the stream so it can be played over the Internet.

It has taken 18 months to process 100 cds (working in my spare time, which I don't have a lot of).

I have noticed that I can take a CD down to an ISO file with BurnAtOnce in under 5 minutes. If I have enough drive space available, I can save the ISOs without converting them to MP3s, saving me lots of time; however, I need a method or server of streaming the audio content from the ISO file format.

From my point of view, there must be a way that I can build an online, on-demand, virtual jukebox with 1000 virtual CDs loaded in it.

I guess what I'm asking is whether or not there is an audio streaming server on the market that does not require prior conversion of the audio CD to MP3, WMV, AVI, etc.

[Stuart Browne]

If you've got the CD's ripped to ISO files, then using something to extract the audio tracks, converting them to MP3 etc.. on the linux box shouldn't take long at all.

The longest part would be the rip.

What tools and process are you using and on what processor are you doing the conversion?

[Alan_152]

Stuart -- On my P4 Fedora box I use Grip.

[TwoProc]

I've made ".iso" files of music CD's by just using the "dd" command.
An example would be:

$> dd if=/dev/ of=/home/user/mycd.iso"

I've not tried it in Linux, but I know it works in HPUX, so it should work in Linux fine.

[Alan_152]

There doesn't seem to be a realistic way of doing this, so I'm stuck converting all of my CDs to MP3s.

[Heironimus]

The method you're using is painful, but there probably is a better way. A shell script to run cdparanoia (copies CD tracks to wav files), lame (encodes wav to MP3), and sox (concatenates wav files) will give you both single- and multi-file versions of each CD without requiring much interaction on your part.

[Stuart Browne]

cdparanioa to rip the entire CD in one hit, lame to encode it. No need to concatenate anything.