cdrdao (“CD recorder disc-at-once”) is a free and open source utility software application for authoring and ripping of audio and data CD-ROMs. It is licensed under GPL-2.0 or Later. The application is available for several operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and was reported to work on other Unix-based operating systems.
cdrdao runs from command line and has no graphical user interface. Several programs for authoring and writing CDs depend on cdrdao and provide a GUI, such as K3b and Brasero, which was the default CD application for the GNOME desktop until around 2013.
Features
cdrdao is capable of reading and writing audio, data, and mixed audio/data discs. It records audio or data CD-Rs in disk-at-once mode based on a textual description of the CD contents, known as a TOC (table of contents) file that can be created and customized inside a text editor. When reading CDs, cdrdao creates a binary dump of the data inside a BIN file and uses the TOC file to index it. The TOC file can be converted to a CUE file using the included toc2cue command. Using the TOC file, audio files can be burned to a disc in WAV format. cdrdao can copy discs, blank discs, create disc image files, and check CDDB information.
A key feature of cdrdao is its full control over the layout of the disc and its tracks. This gives it the ability to create non-standard gaps between audio tracks that are different than two seconds in length and contain non-zero audio data. It can also create hidden tracks and intro tracks.
