Burning a CDROM from a bin/cue file

Some CD-ROM images are distributed as a bin/cue image or bin/toc - both composed of two files, a binary image with the data and a "table of content" file named the same as the binary image but with a .cue or .toc extension. You can burn this type of image using either the command line tool 'cdrdao', or one of several available graphical front-ends.

The most popular graphical burning applications, are K3B for the KDE desktop (which also supports burning cue/wav which is a variation of cue/bin sometimes used for distributing CD-Audion images) and Brasero for the GNOME desktop. Using either of these is pretty straight-forward.

In order to use the command line tool 'cdrdao', make sure that both the bin and cue files are in your current directory (you see them when typing ls) when you invoke this command.

Type man cdrdao to see all options. Also see the section below on 'common options for cdrdao'.

cdrdao will turn on burnproof/burnfree automagically if it is available on your CD recorder.

Burning under kernel version 2.4 or less
Assuming you set up ide-scsi setup for your 2.4 (or less) kernel, you could now invoke cdrdao as follows:

cdrdao write --device 0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc --speed 16 NameOfCUEOrTOCFile

Burning under kernel version 2.6 or higher
cdrdao write --device ATA:0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc --speed 16 NameOfCUEOrTOCFile

Common options for cdrdao

 * The first option tells cdrdao what you want to do. cdrdao can also be used to read an existing CD and make a bin/cue image from that. But that is another topic.


 * The device command tells cdrdao where to find your CD writer. Like described in Burning a CDROM from an ISO file, if have a CD drive and a CD recorder, you might need to change this line (depending on the order that you have your drives in the IDE tree) to 0,1,0. Type "cdrecord scanbus" in a terminal to see what device to use.


 * Some drives are not known to cdrdao and it won't know what driver to use, so we specify it. Most CD recorders will use generic_mmc.


 * Speed is obvious. If the cd writable medium you are using does not support a high speed, it will use that instead.


 * Lastly the name of the .cue or .toc file.

See also here for a simple script to generate such a file.
 * The simplest form of TOC file is for an audio CD where each track is to be created from a .wav file. This has the format

Mounting a BIN/CUE or IMG/CUE file
To mount a BIN/CUE or IMG/CUE file you can use the 'cdemu' kernel module.

Another approach is to convert the image to iso. You can use BinChunker for Unix / Linux (he.fi) to do that. After you create the iso image you can mount it through a loop device by specifying "-o loop" in the mount command