PM Vibes has some great trance mixes available for download.  Unfortunately, they're provided in the form of one large MP3 file with a cue sheet describing the track layout for burning to a recordable CD:

-rw-r--r-- 1 prox prox       543 2009-07-01 11:22 PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 CD.cue
-rw-r--r-- 1 prox prox    424471 2009-06-30 22:15 PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 cover.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 prox prox 115071104 2009-06-17 12:04 PM - Dream Melodies volume 10.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 prox prox      2108 2009-07-04 16:23 PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 SONGS.cue
-rw-r--r-- 1 prox prox      1184 2009-06-17 15:58 PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 tracklist.txt

To make matters worse, there seems to be absolutely no way of burning or converting this on Debian GNU/Linux without some [re]compilation.

The packages that should provide this functionality include the following:

• wodim - command line CD/DVD writing tool (formerly cdrecord)
• cdrdao - records CDs in Disk-At-Once (DAO) mode
• gnomebaker - application for CD/DVD creation in the GNOME desktop

Every one of the above applications (ok, so Gnomebaker is just a cdrdao GUI front-end) claim to read cue files, but the Debian packages don't include MP3 support.  You'll get something like this:

% cdrdao write --overburn -v 2 --device /dev/scd0 --speed 16 "PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 SONGS.cue" 
Cdrdao version 1.2.2 - (C) Andreas Mueller <andreas@daneb.de>
  SCSI interface library - (C) Joerg Schilling
  Paranoia DAE library - (C) Monty

Check http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/drives.html#dt for current driver tables.

ERROR: Can't read file "PM - Dream Melodies volume 10.mp3": cdrdao was compiled without MP3 support.
ERROR: PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 SONGS.cue:165: Cannot determine length of track data specification.

So it would seem the only way to burn such a beast is to compile cdrdao (or wodim, whatever) by hand.  I needed to grab libmad0-dev, and configure cdrdao via the following:

% ./configure --with-mp3-support

This resulted in the following summary, which ended up building a cdrdao binary that includes MP3 support:

------------------------------------------------------
  Building scsilib   : no (using native interface)
  Building pccts     : yes
  Building cdrdao    : yes
     OGG support     : yes
     MP3 support     : yes
  Building toc2cue   : yes
  Building cue2toc   : yes
  Building toc2mp3   : yes
  Building gcdmaster : yes
------------------------------------------------------

However, the fun wasn't over, yet!  The cue file still caused problems:

% $HOME/src/cdrdao-1.2.3/dao/cdrdao write -v 2 --device /dev/scd0 --speed 16 *SONGS*cue                                                                                      
Cdrdao version 1.2.3 - (C) Andreas Mueller <andreas@daneb.de>
ERROR: Can't read file "PM - Dream Melodies volume 10.mp3": cdrdao was compiled without MP3 support.
ERROR: PM - Dream Melodies volume 10 SONGS.cue:165: Cannot determine length of track data specification.

You'll notice that I got the same error earlier, too.  Apparently there's a bug in cdrdao that was introduced by a patch (that subsequently made its way into Debian, too - more strikes against that package!) related to reading of track lengths in TOC files, reversing changes made by upstream.  Uh, yeah, this breaks stuff.  An Ubuntu bug #490292 was filed against the cdrdao package about this.

I commented out the block of code in TocParser.g, and recompiled.  Finally, success.

Things are really not as simple as they should be, sometimes.

I'd submit bug reports about this, but I'm fuzzy on the complexity of MP3 licensing - the Debian developers may have no choice but to remove MP3 support from these packages.  I did post a message to the debian-user mailing list about this.

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