how to make one big .m3u file

Back in the day, oh, about RedHat 9 or so, I ripped my entire CD collection to .mp3. Now that I have a Fedora Core box, I noticed something different. It appears that there just ain't no more .mp3 support, plain and simple. Of course, there is a reason for things being this way, that being copyright. Fine. I re-rip my entire collection to .ogg format, since that seems to be the preferred format for Linux folks, and also, I can find a few players that work with .ogg and other devices.

Using grip to rip to ogg is easy enough, but the .m3u files that are created are per-cd. The particular player I am using on my pda doesn't do multiple .m3u files, so I need to create one fat .m3u from all the individual .m3u files.

So, here is what I found to be an easy solution for me.

I'm using FC1, so I drop in a blank CD and up pops the "Burn:///" window. I drag in the folders of music, and toss in the individual .m3u files at the root level. This gives me all the individual .m3u files so I can play a cd at a time. But now for the big one. I open another file browser window by picking "Home Folder" from the "hat" menu (which seems to be a blatant rip-off of the "start" menu in Windows, but of course Linux folks never steal ideas, they just innovate, right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.). So, with this new window open, I navigate to the /tmp directory and make a new folder "temp", so I got a /tmp/temp.

Okay, so I got two windows open, one with the burn:/// files, the other an empty /tmp/temp window. I drag the .m3u files from the burn:/// folder over into the /tmp/temp folder. This does a copy, not a move. Good.

I pop open a command-line window, and navigate to the /tmp/temp folder I just made
cd /tmp/temp
I then create one big EVERYTHING.m3u file by copying all the little .m3u files.
cat *.m3u > EVERYTHING.m3u
I close the command-line window.
Drag that EVERYTHING.m3u file from the /tmp/temp folder over into the Burn:/// folder
And burn the CD.