K3b was created to be a feature-rich and easy to handle CD burning application. It consists of basically three parts:

1. The projects: Projects are created from the file menu and then filled with data to burn.
2. The Tools: The tools menu offers different tools like CD copy or DVD formatting.
3. Context sensitive media actions: When clicking on the Icon representing a CD/DVD drive K3b will present it's contents and allow some further action. This is for example the way to rip audio CDs.

Features:
The features are presented in no particular order and the list might be incomplete...

- Creating data cds:
* Add files and folders to your data cd project via drag'n'drop.
* Remove files from your project, move files within your project.
* Create empty directories within your project.
* Write data cds on-the-fly directly without an image file or with image file. It's also possible to just create the image file and write it to cd later.
* Rockridge and Joliet support.
* Rename files in your project.
* Let K3b rename all the mp3/ogg files you add to your project to a common format like "artist - title.mp3".
* For advanced users: support for nearly all the mkisofs options.
* Verifying the burned data.
* Support for multiple El-Torito boot images.
* Multisession support
- Creating audio cds:
* Pluggable audio decoding. Plugins for WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis are included.
* CD-TEXT support. Will automatically be filled in from tags in audio files.
* Write audio cds on-the-fly without decoding audio files to wav before.
* Normalize volume levels before writing.
* Cut audio tracks at the beginning and the end.
- Creating Video CDs:
* VCD 1.1, 2.0, SVCD
* CD-i support (Version 4)
- Creating mixed-mode CDs:
* CD-Extra (CD-Plus, Enhanced Audio CD) support.
* All data and audio project features.
- Creating eMovix CDs
- CD Copy
* Copy single and multi session data CDs
* Copy Audio CDs
* Copy Enhanced Audio CDs (CD-Extra)
* Copy CD-Text
* Add CD-Text from cddb
* CD Cloning mode for perfect single session CD copies
- DVD burning:
* Support for DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W)
* Creating data DVD projects
* Creating eMovix DVDs
* Formatting DVD-RWs and DVD+RWs
- CD Ripping:
* CDDB support via http, cddbp and local cddb directory.
* Sophisticated pattern system to automatically organize the ripped tracks in directories and name them according to album, title, artist, and track number.
* CD-TEXT reading. May be used instead of CDDB info.
* K3b stores CDDB info of the ripped tracks which will automatically be used as CD-TEXT when adding the ripped files to an audio project.
* Plugin system to allow encoding to virtually every audio format. Plugins to encode to Ogg Vorbis, Mp3, FLAC, and all formats supported by SoX included.
- DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding
- Save/load projects.
- Blanking of CDR-Ws.
- Retrieving Table of contents and cdr information.
- Writing existing iso images to CD or DVD with optional verification of the written data.
- Writing cue/bin files created for CDRWIN
- DVD copy (no video transcoding yet)
- Enhanced CD device handling:
* Detection of max. writing and reading speed.
* Detection of Burnfree and Justlink support.
* Good media detection and optional automatic CD-RW and DVD-RW blanking
- KParts-Plugin ready.