Craig,

Yeah, for awhile I was going down the downloaded singles path but now my
  new FLAC decision has re-kindled a love of the CD.  CD->FLAC =
DRM-free + High-Quality :-)

I just tried out our mp3fs suggestion.  It's pretty slick!  I'd consider
it an 90% solution, in some ways.  Here's what I did:

1. Built and installed mp3fs (of course)
2. Mounted my FLAC directory into a /mnt/mp3 fuse mount point using 192 cbr
3. Fired up k3b, dragged and dropped the files I wanted burnt and burnt 'em!

This is ultra close to the all-in-one solution that I'm looking for.
Once I mount the fuse dir, it automatically converts the files when
needed.  So all I have to do at CD burning time is to just select the
files I want.  No intermediate converting-to-a-temp-dir (on my part) is
needed.

This is a 90% solution and not a 100% one, though, for four reasons:

1. You can only choose constant bit rate encoding.  I've been leaning
more and more towards variable bit rate for quality reasons and I'm
leery of going back to CBR.
2. My car's mp3-cd player isn't reading any metadata fields (title,
singer, album, etc) from the burned mp3s.  Dunno if this is the player
fault or the mp3fs encoder fault just yet... but I'm leaning towards the
encoder.
3. Since it's all on-the-fly, it can be a bit slow.  Part of the reason
for slowness on my end is surely because my FLAC files are accessed via
NFS... but still, the access and encoding was slow enough that the k3b
buffers nearly ran out several times.
4. Finally, it only converts to mp3.  I would like a convenient
interface to convert to an arbitrary format... like AAC or Vorbis, or
maybe Apple Lossless (if possible).

Still, 90% isn't bad.  I recommend trying it out!

Kurt

Craig Brooksby wrote:
> Kurt:
> 
> I recently ripped all my CDs to FLAC and am enjoying them
> (rediscovering them, really) using Rhythmbox.  So much so, that I am
> now ready to bypass my cheapo DACs on my motherboard, and use outboard
> DACs via SPDIF.  I haven't had this much fun with stereo since the
> '70s.
> 
> I am not a hardcore command-line guy and I too prefer GUI-clicky apps
> :-) but I'll gladly go there if I have to.
> 
> I am looking for exactly the same solution you are -- I'd like to be
> able to whip together MP3 CDs for my car, more or less directly from
> my FLAC repository.  So please continue to share what you come up
> with.
> 
> Wondering if you have seen this, which seems to get closer to your
> objective.  I haven't tried it yet.  http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Craig
> 
> On 5/12/07, Kurt Granroth <plug-discuss@granroth.org> wrote:
>> I am in the process of ripping all of my CDs into FLAC format to be a
>> bit future-proof.  My thinking is that if I need a song in a particular
>> format (AAC, OGG, MP3, etc), I can just convert from the (lossless) FLAC
>> copy when needed and just "throw it away" when I'm done.
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