InformIT: Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

Playing Audio CDs

Playing audio CD-ROMs or music CDs requires a properly configured sound card, along with a Linux CD-ROM device pointing to your computer's CD drive. The default entry in your Red Hat Linux filesystem table, /etc/fstab, will show an entry that looks like this:

/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0

This entry shows (from left to right) that the device /dev/cdrom (which will be a symbolic link to the proper device, such as /dev/hdc for an ATAPI IDE CD-ROM drive), will be mounted under the /mnt/cdrom directory. The parts of the table entry designate the default filesystem to use, along with mounting and filesystem-checking options. You may also need to set correct permissions on the device (such as 0600) to allow users to play music.

You'll need a device entry for your CD-ROM in order to play audio CDs. Laptop users with an external CD-ROM will need to use an audio patch cable running from the external CD's audio-out jack to external speakers or the laptop's audio-in jack in order to hear the music.

The next step is to choose a music player. Red Hat Linux comes with several music CD players you can use with or without X11:

xplaycd—A simple X11 CD player client
tcd—A CD player for the text console
gtcd—A GNOME CD player client with Internet features
kscd—A KDE CD player client with Internet features

For example, to play an audio CD, insert the CD in your computer, then start a player such as gtcd, like this:


   # gtcd &

Note that the player only has one slider control for volume. If you need more control, use a graphical mixer such as the gmix client. If you have an active Internet connection, gtcd will use its default settings, go out to a remote CD database server, and retrieve the name of your album, along with the name of each track. You can then click the Track Editor button to see your disc's information, as shown in Figure 8.15.

If your CD's information is not available, you can use the track editor (in Figure 8.15) to submit information back to the remote server. If you use KDE's kscd client, audio database information can be stored locally under the /usr/share/apps/kscd/cddb directory in one of 10 categories: blues, classical, country, folk, jazz, misc, newage, reggae, rock, or soundtrack.

Figure 8.15 Track information retrieved over the Internet can be displayed, or if not present, submitted back to a remote server.

Playing .mp3s | Next Section

Previous Section