Burn 4 CDs at once with Debian and cdrskin

I believe this will work with cdrecord too. I set up Debian on my system and cdrskin is their cdrecord lookalike. At least for this job it works well.

Here's a cdrskin commandline that burns an audio cd.

sudo cdrskin ...

If you notice the *.wav, that lets me use the same script for different audio cds. I put my script, burn4.txt, in my Music folder and then I create a folder for each cd. so I change to the folder with the audio files I want to burn and then I

../burn4.txt

This will burn the files in alphabetical order so I start each file with the track number like this.

ls

01_intro.wav
02_Malaysia.wav
03_talk.wav
04_Catamaran.wav
...

So I built a system with 4 sata burners. The system was given to me with one burner, a Lite-on, and I bought 3 more LG burners from Newegg for $15 each. Since the motherboard supports 4 sata devices I'm using an IDE hard drive that I already had.

This command will list your cd/dvd recorders.

cdrskin --devices

So I just copied the command into burn4.txt 4 times and then I changed the device numbers so each command controlled a different burner. This burned 4 cds all right, one after the other.

To get it to burn 4 cds at once I just added an ampersand to the end of each command. Parallel operations don't always provide for increased speed but in this case since the bottleneck is in the burn speed burning 4 at once went a lot faster.

And more importantly it's 4 cds ready for quality control and printing in one unattended operation.

I want to get rid of the sudo command. When I don't run as root cdrskin gives a message about making the drives writable. Maybe that will get around this inconvenience.

I am curious about whether this would work with 4 ide dvd burners and a little bit less machine. If I do that project and it works I'll be able to burn 8 cds at the same time. Wouldn't that be some jazz?