Disc-Cover

Rip, Mix, Create a Cover

Hendrik Weimer

2006-05-17

Normal version

Fortunately, the recording industry does not completely control our lives yet, so we are still able to share CDs with our friends or create our own compilations. Since a plain CD-R rarely gives any hints on what's stored on it, a printed cover comes very handy. To create a printable cover with Disc-Cover you simply put the CD into your CD drive and run the program. Besides the command-line version, there is also a CGI script available if you want to have a web-based solution.

Front and back cover

Front and back cover
(click to enlarge)

Disc-Cover uses the track information to ask a CDDB server for the title and artist as well as the song names. If there are any ambiguities, the program will ask which search result is the correct one. The program then creates a front and back cover with artist, title and track information. The cover can be created in a plethora of formats, namely PDF, HTML, LaTeX, Postscript, CDDB template and a format suitable for cdlabelgen. Having LaTeX files is especially useful to make corrections. Sometimes these are necessary as Disc-Cover doesn't support non-ASCII characters, which are simply missing in the final output.

Of course, just inserting a CD won't work when you want to create a cover for your custom compilation. Therefore, you can first build a CDDB template based on the track information, enter the song names manually and then run Disc-Cover again to produce the final output. Within some limits, this can be scripted, although the CDDB file format is not so easy to deal with. A cool feature would be to have Disc-Cover extract tag information from audio files so that you don't have to enter them manually.

Disc-Cover offers a number of additional options. Depending on the size of your jewel case (e.g. for slim cases) a different layout can be used. Double albums are supported as well, and it is possible to put a picture on the front cover. Additional text may be added to the cover, too.

When creating a larger number of covers (which you will probably do if you like Disc-Cover), it becomes tedious to always change the CDs for each cover. Unfortunately, only the CGI version allows to directly query the CDDB server.

Altogether, Disc-Cover is a good choice to create CD covers. Its support for many different output formats make it possible to build even more powerful scripts around it.

Disc-Cover
Version:1.5.4
Homepage:http://www.vanhemert.co.uk/disc-cover.html
License:GPL
Distributions: [?]■ Debian stable■ Debian unstable
□ Fedora■ Mandriva
□ Suse■ Ubuntu
Pros:
Rating:

84

  • CDDB queries
  • LaTeX output
Cons:
  • Missing non-ASCII characters
  • No manual CDDB search

Copyright 2006–2008 OS Reviews. This document is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See the licensing terms for further details.