I'm trying to transfer some cassette tapes to CD. My first step was to plug my tape player into the line-in on my sound card and capture the audio. I have a cheap sound card but was pleasantly surprised by the mp3s I was able to get this way.

So I fired up k3b and clicked the Audio CD quickstart thingy, and it said to drag and drop sound files into it. So I dropped my mp3s into it, and it gave me an error dialog saying this is an unsupported file format. It strikes me as a little odd that k3b doesn't support mp3 for making audio CDs, but anyway I converted them to .wav files, verified that they work, then dragged and dropped them into the project. Same result--unsupported file format.

Anyway, I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the CDs you put in your CD player basically just have .wav files in them and that if you just copy .wav files onto a blank CD you can play it. That sounds too good to be true, but I tried it, and sure enough, it was too good to be true.

So what weird and esoteric sound file format do I need to make an audio CD, and how can I make it work with k3b?

You don't need anything weird or esoteric. Check if you have the required external programs listed in k3b. Goto settings--> configure k3b--> programs. Look under cdrecord and transcode.

They're both there and have the little green checkmark on them.

K3B is using an internal decoding module ( K3B MAD decoder ) to decode MP3 files, so no external dependencies.
If it's popping you that message, then the most likely thing is that K3B was built without MP3 support ( sounds odd, but actually it's the default policy in distros like Fedora due to some obscure licencing issues, regarding MP3.
To bypass that, you can
1. Decode MP3 to wav externally first ( which is what you did).
2. Find at PLF another build of K3B, with MP3 support ( not using Mandriva, so I do not know if it exists or not )
3. Compile K3B yourself from source, without using any MP3 disabling configure switch.
4. Using another distro which has less worries about GPL-related issues.

BUT, since it's also complaining when dropping wav files, then it seems that you do miss something basic. What do you get after a

as root? I wouldn't be surprised if it's not installed at all...

Finally, no, you cannot drop wav files to an empty CD to get an audio CD, quite simply because an audioCD does not have any files in it.

You most certainly can [Edit] NOT [/Edit] just burn a CD with .wav files on it, and have it play in ordinary CD players, I've done it many times.
[Edit] I have done it many times, but alas, I have never actually done it, I have been mistaken all these years, I am a buffoon !! [/Edit]

And you need the 'MAD' decoder plug in thingy for burning an audio CD from .mp3 files with K3B. Here's what you get pop up in Ubuntu when you fire up K3b

A CD with .wav files in it is a plain data CD, and does not play in ANY CD-Player on Planet Earth... period.

Certainly not on mine, anyway.

This is what I get:

Followup: There's definitely something wrong with how my .mp3 files are encoded. Can somebody tell me in simple terms how to capture mp3 (or .wav) files from my sound card?

Also, can lame convert between mp3 and .wav or can't it? I've tried
lame myfile.mp3 myfile.wav
but the resulting .wav file is just static.

As I said, I've done it many times, so there is nothing anyone could possibly say that can change that. Period.


[Edit] Oh, and just for kicks, I dug up a couple of the CD's which I created buy burning .wav files to, inserted it into my Pioneer stereo system, and am now happily listening them, I guess my CD player must not be from Earth [/Edit]

[Edit2]I find that perhaps my CD player isn't the only thing not of this Earth, I am a buffoon !!
As the Scarecrow says, you CAN NOT just burn .wav files to a CD, and have it play in a regular CD player,[/Edit2]

Not even reading the Red Book Specifications?
The CD's you have created do not have ***ANY*** files in, just raw datastreams (usually referred as "Audio Tracks").
An audio CD cannot be mounted, cannot be imaged as ISO image, cannot use any filesystem other than RAW- and that filesystem excludes the presence of ***ANY*** sort of "files" within the audioCD structure.
So, what you have done was mastering an audioCD out of .wav files, no matter what you thought you were doing. But your audioCD does not have any files in it, .wav or anything else.
Regards.

I have been investigating out of interest myself, and, the conclusion that I have come to is along the lines of, (these CD's I am refering to were all created back in my Windows days) that even though I was under the assumption that I was burning .wav files to the CD, then, playing them in my CD player, windows, or the program I was using, was converting the .wav's unbeknown to me, in a similar fashion as to what happens when you create an audio cd from mp3's. I twigged to this as I tried under Linux to burn .wav files to a CD just to check, when I added the .wav tracks to the cd project, k3b automatically selected 'Audio CD', so I thought, hmmm, maybe windows was converting the .wav files without my knowledge, and I only 'thought' that I was actually burning the .wav's directly to the CD.

Now I must go around to my brothers house, and use his Windows PC and burn some .wav files to a CD, to see what gives, but I think it is as I now suspect.
[Edit] and as I see you have explained above, which is I think similar to what I now assume. Another long held belief bits the dust, don't you just hate that

I will return

Scarecrow, you are, as you know, quite correct, and I have been under the wrong assumption for many years. Thank you for leading me to see my error, I feel all deflated, and saddened that I have lived with the belief of this lie for so long. Now when I think about it, how silly it was, I would argue black and blue with anyone who suggested that you could simply burn .mp3 files to a CD, and have them play in regular CD players (although today you can play mp3's in CD players, at least I hope you can ) but would insist that there has to first be a conversion done, whether you know it or not. Why did I not think the same for .wav files?,

I know why,

I am a buffoon !!

@javaguy: I don't know what app you used to capture the sound from your line in. You may have more success with the capturing and conversion process using a frontend app like Audacity. It should be in your list of packages.

Yes, quite a few CD-players do playback data CD's with .MP3 files in them... but not .wav files.

And of course those CD's with the MP3 files are not audioCD's.
Moreover, technically neither mixed mode CD's (= a data track followed by some audio tracks), nor CD-Extra (same thing, but the data track follows the audio tracks) can be considered as audioCD's, although they certainly play in CD-Players- the former to quite a few, and the latter to almost any CD Player who is less than ten years old.

You don't have to feel bad for that mistake, because this is the impression one gets at first. He can even see some .cda files in the audioCD structure under windows (just a few bytes long), but these files do not actually exist- they are virtual.
The Linux virtual filesystems are more advanced- for example under KDE if you type in the addy bar "audioCD:/" you will discover a whole bunch of files: wav, flac, mp3, ogg... but all of them are virtual, none of them really exists before the user does something useful with them.

Now to javaguy: Give it a try with audacity, as already suggested, and get sure you are picking the correct record input at your mixer. The are more advanced recording solutions than Audacity, but for your simple needs they surely are an overkill.

Here's where I am now: I recorded a tape using Audacity and got some nice .wav files that work.

I created an audio cd project and dropped the .wav files into it, then burned my CD. K3b said everything was A-okay and ejected the disc. To make sure, I put the disc back in and ran the CD Player program. It worked fine. Javaguy was Happy.

So this morning I got into my car to drive to work, put the CD in the player, saw "Track 1" briefly on the display thingy, then "Err." I ejected the disc blew the dust off and tried again just to make sure. "Err" again. I tried the other disc I made last night and got the same result. Javaguy was Unhappy.

It seems that your CD player is not particularly happy with the media dye you are using. Can you name the brand of the CDR blanks?
You could try burning again using the lowest possible speed, and using DAO (disk-at-once) burning mode.

I have only superlatives to say about Mitsui Gold media, which are rather expensive and not that easy to find. So far they have played flawlessly for me everywhere, including two-buck-portables.
But you can try other, good quality media- Taiyo Yuden, Ricoh... mostly Japanese stuff.

files on an Audio-CD are shown with the ending .cda when opened in a file manager, so if you look on your CD and it contains .wav then it is definitely no Audio-CD

Uggh. This is certainly an education for me.

I don't see any files, .cda or otherwise, when I look at it in the file manager.

I kinda thought that a CD was a CD and that a CD player was a CD player. Certainly there is varying quality, just like there are good and bad quality cassette tapes, but any cassette tape will play in any cassette player in the world.

I'm using Memorex CDs, which have never been a problem for anything computer-related for me. I guess I'll look for one of those you recommend.

Thanks.

OK, forgot to mention that I was on a Win-Box that evening, technically the files on Audio-CDs are not much different from .wav files except that at least Win shows them as .cda, the problem is that your Audio-CD-Player needs a special indexing on the CD to find the tracks, therefore just burning files on a CD won't do it, but since you used the Audio-CD option in K3B it seems to be the media (and yes there are big differences between CD-media).

BTW: your CD-Player seems to accept it as Audio-CD (showing the track), it just does not like the quality, otherwise it would say no disc or wrong media, but as you described at least it tries to play the disc

Ermmm... sorry to say that these .cda files are just a few bytes long, and so they are slightly smaller than .wav files!
They are nothing more than "shortcuts" for the tracks present on the CD, not real files.
Factly, you can even see these nonexisting .cda files (together with a bunch of also nonexisting .wav, .ogg, .flac, .mp3 and so on...) under Linux as well: Just open Konqueror, type in the addy bar "audiocd:/" and browse...

It's the CD player for a Geo Prizm, so maybe it's not sophisticated enough to have any error messages other than "Err."