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518 Part IV . Running Applications Start the XMMS audio player by selecting Sound & Video.Audio Player or by typing xmms from a Terminal window. Figure 20-5 shows the XMMS audio player with the associated equalizer (below) and the Playlist Editor (to the right). Figure 20-5: Play Ogg Vorbis and other audio files from the XMMS playlist. As noted earlier, you can play several audio file formats. Supported formats include: . MP3 (with added plug-in) . Ogg Vorbis . WAV . AU . CD Audio . CIN Movies If XMMS is not able to find a configured sound card, it redirects its output to the Disk Writer plug-in. This causes the files you play to be written to hard disk as WAV files. You can get many more audio plug-ins from www.xmms.org. The XMMS audio player can be used in the following way: 1. Obtain music files by ripping songs from a CD or copying them from the Web so that they are in an accessible directory, or by inserting a music CD in your CD-ROM drive. (XMMS expects the CD to be accessible from /dev/cdrom.) 2. From the applications menu, select Sound & Video.Audio Player. The X Multimedia System player appears. 3. Click the Eject button. The Load files window appears. 4. If you have inserted a CD, the contents of /mnt/cdrom appear in the Files pane. Select the files you want to add to your Playlist and click the Add Selected Files or the Add All Files in Directory button to add all songs from Note
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Chapter 20 . Playing Music and Video 517 If your distribution does not include support for MP3 playback with Rhythmbox, fear not there is hope! You can download updates for Rhythmbox at www .gstreamer.net. You want the package gstreamer-plugins-mp3. In addition to playing music files, Rhythmbox can launch Sound Juicer to rip CDs (see the Ripping CDs with Grip section later in the chapter for more on ripping CD audio). Rhythmbox can also play Internet radio stations. The easiest way to do this is to find a streaming radio station (look for Shoutcast PLS files, usually with a .pls extension). Save the PLS file, and then double-click the file in the Nautilus file browser. Nautilus comes configured to launch Rhythmbox for playing audio. Figure 20-4 shows Rhythmbox with three Internet radio stations. Figure 20-4: Rhythmbox playing Internet radio. The site www.di.fm lists a number of free Internet radio channels. Playing Music with XMMS Multimedia Player The XMMS (X Multimedia System) multimedia player provides a graphical interface for playing music files in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and other audio formats. XMMS has some nice extras too, including an equalizer, a playlist editor, and the capability to add more audio plug-ins. One of its greatest attributes is that XMMS is easy to use. If the player looks familiar to you, that s because it is styled after the Windows Winamp program. Red Hat removed all software that does MP3 encoding or decoding because of patent concerns related to MP3 format. Although the XMMS player was designed to play MP3 files, the XMMS plug-in required to actually decode MP3 is not included. To add MP3 support back into your Red Hat/Fedora Core distribution, you can get and install an MP3 plug-in. One place to get RPM packages that support MP3 decoding is http://rpm.livna.org. They are also available from other sources, including www.xmms.org and www.gurulabs.com/ downloads.html. This issue does not necessarily apply to other Red Hat derived distributions, such as Mandrake 10.0. Note Tip Note
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516 Part IV . Running Applications Playing Music with Rhythmbox Audio Player Rhythmbox provides the GNOME music player that lets you do everything, at least according to the Rhythmbox documentation. You can play music files, import music from CDs, and play Internet radio stations, all from one interface. The first time you run Rhythmbox, the program displays a setup wizard (see Figure 20-2). You can tell Rhythmbox where you store your music files, and Rhythmbox will index, sort, and help you maintain a music library. Figure 20-2: Defining where you store your music. After you ve gone through the setup wizard, you ll see the main music library interface (see Figure 20-3). Rhythmbox makes it easy to organize even large collections of music files. Figure 20-3: Viewing a music library with Rhythmbox.
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Chapter 20 . Playing Music and Video 515 Insert the music CD you want to play, and then at a shell prompt type: $ cdp You should see a blue screen containing the cdp display. To start the CD on a track other than 1, include the track number with the play command. Here s an example of starting a CD on track 5: $ cdp play 5 When cdp starts, you can see all the tracks, how long each track plays, and total play time. To control the play of the CD, use the following controls (turn on Num Lock to use these numbers from the numeric keypad): 9 Play 8 Pause/Resume 7 Stop 6 Next Track 5 Replay Current Track 4 Previous Track 3 Forward 15 Seconds 2 Quit (Stop Music, Exit, and Eject) 1 Back 15 Seconds 0 Exit (Continue Music and Exit) . Help (Press the period key) The cdp display also lets you enter the names of the artist, CD, and each song. Because this information is saved, you can see it each time you play the CD. Type these commands while the cdp display is showing to edit information about the CD currently playing: a Edit the Artist Name and press Enter. c Edit the CD Name and press Enter. Enter Edit the title of the current song and press Enter again. If you try to edit a song name and cdp crashes, type eject to stop the CD from playing. Editing the song name seems to work better if you pause the song first. The arrow keys are also pretty handy for controlling CDs in cdp. The up arrow is for pause/play, and the left arrow is to go back a track. The right arrow is to go forward a track, and the down arrow is to eject. Caution
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514 Part IV . Running Applications Playing CDs with gnome-cd Like most graphical CD players, the gnome-cd player has controls that look similar to what you would see on a physical CD player. If you are using the GNOME desktop, from the main menu select Sound & Video.CD Player, or from a Terminal window, type: $ gnome-cd & If your computer is connected to the Internet, for most CDs you ll see the title and artist information. Even obscure artists are (usually) represented in the free online databases. If the information isn t available, you can enter it yourself. The interface for adding information about the CD and its tracks is very nice. Click the Open Track Editor button. You can add Artist and Title information about the CD. Then you can select each track to type in the track name. To add the name of the artist and the disk title, click in the appropriate text box, and type in that information. Figure 20-1 shows the CD Player and the CDDB Track Editor. Figure 20-1: Play CDs and store artist, title, and track information with gnome-cd. Playing CDs with Cdp If you are working from a dumb terminal or just don t have your X desktop running, you can run the cdp utility to play CDs. The cdp utility is available in most Linux distributions but is a free to distribute and copyrighted piece of software and may not show up in all distributions. I don t suggest running this utility from a Terminal window; it doesn t display properly.
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Chapter 20 . Playing Music and Video 513 . Grip (grip) While Grip is primarily used as a CD ripper, it can also play CDs. Select Multimedia.Grip (or type grip in a Terminal window). It includes tools for gathering data from and submitting data to CD databases. It also includes tools for copying (ripping) CD tracks and converting them to different formats (encoding). Naturally, the grip package must be installed to use this command. . CDPlay (cdp) If you don t have access to the desktop, you can use the textbased cdp command. This player lets you use keyboard keys to play your CD, select tracks, go forward or back, or eject. The cdp or cdplay package, depending on your Linux distribution, must be installed to use this command. . X Multimedia System (xmms) The XMMS player plays a variety of audio formats but can also play directly from a CD. If you try some of these CD players and your CD-ROM drive is not working, see the sidebar Troubleshooting Your CD-ROM for further information. Note Troubleshooting Your CD-ROM If you are unable to play CDs on your CD-ROM drive, here are a few things you can check to correct the problem: . Verify that your sound card is installed and working properly. . Verify that the CD-ROM drive was detected when you booted Linux. If your CD-ROM drive is an IDE drive, type dmesg | grep ^hd. You should see messages about your CD-ROM that resemble hdc: CD-ROM CDU701, ATAPI CDROM drive or hdc: ATAPI 14X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache. . If you see no indication of a CD-ROM drive, verify that the power supply and cables to the CD-ROM are connected. To make sure that the hardware is working, you can also boot to DOS and try to access the CD. . Try inserting a software CD-ROM. If you are running the GNOME or KDE desktop, a desktop icon should appear indicating that the CD mounted by itself. If no such icon appears, go to a Terminal window, and, as the root user, type mount /dev/cdrom. Then change to the /mnt/cdrom or /dev/media directory and list the contents using the command cd /mnt/cdrom; ls. This tells you if the CD-ROM is accessible. . If you get the CD-ROM working but it fails with the message CDROM device: Permission denied when you try to play music as a non root user, the problem may be that /dev/cdrom (which is typically a link to the actual hardware device) is not readable by anyone but root. Type ls -l /dev/cdrom to see what the device is linked to. Then (as the root user), if, for example, the CD device were /dev/hdc, type chmod 644 /dev/hdc to enable all users to read your CD-ROM and to enable the root user to write to it. One warning: If others use your computer, they will be able to read any CD you place in this drive.
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512 Part IV . Running Applications . /dev/dsp, /dev/dsp1 Digital sampling devices, which many audio applications identify to access your sound card. Under Udev, these devices are symbolic links to /dev/sound/dsp and /dev/sound/dsp1, respectively. . /dev/mixer, /dev/mixer1 Sound-mixing devices. Under Udev, these devices are symbolic links to /dev/sound/mixer and /dev/sound/mixer1, respectively. . /dev/sequencer Provides a low-level interface to MIDI, FM, and GUS. Under Udev, these devices are symbolic links to /dev/sound/sequencer and /dev/sound/sequencer1, respectively. . /dev/midi00 Provides raw access to MIDI ports. Under Udev, raw access to MIDI ports is handled by symbolic links to device-special files in /dev/snd named midiC[D0-9]. For example, /dev/midi00 would be a symbolic link to /dev/midiCD0. For general information about sound in Linux, see the Sound-HOWTO (for tips about sound cards and general sound issues) and the Sound-Playing-HOWTO (for tips on software for playing different types of audio files). You can find Linux HOWTOs at www.tldp.org. Choosing an Audio CD Player The GNOME CD player (gnome-cd) is the default CD player for GNOME desktop systems. In fact, if the HAL daemon (hald) is enabled, as it is with Fedora systems, gnome-cd pops up automatically on the GNOME desktop when you insert a CD. It has standard play buttons and lets you get track information automatically from a CD database, such as freedb.org. (If your CD isn t listed in the database, you can enter your own track information manually.) However, a variety of CD players come with Linux distributions or may be downloaded and installed. Here is a cross-section of your other choices for playing CDs with Linux: . Rhythmbox (rhythmbox) Import and manage your CD collection with Rhythmbox music management and playback software for GNOME. It uses GStreamer on the audio backend and compresses music using Ogg Vorbis audio format. In addition to enabling you to create playlists of your music library, Rhythmbox also has features for playing Internet radio stations. . KsCD player (kscd) The KsCD player comes with the KDE desktop. To use it, the kdemultimedia package must be installed. From the main menu on the KDE desktop, select Multimedia.KsCD (or type kscd in a Terminal window). Like gnome-cd, this player lets you get title, track, and artist information from the CD database. KsCD, however, also lets you submit information to a CD database (if your CD isn t found there).
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Chapter 20 . Playing Music and Video 511 . Full-duplex support Full-duplex means that recording and playback occur at the same time. This is particularly useful for bidirectional Internet communication, such as Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) telephony or simultaneous recording and playback. . Input/output ports Several different ports on the board enable you to connect other input/output devices. These ports include: Line-In Connects an external CD player, cassette deck, synthesizer, MiniDisc, or other device for recording or playback. If you have a television card, you might also patch that card s line-out to your sound card s line-in. Microphone Connects a microphone for audio recording or communications. Line-Out (Speaker Out) Connects unpowered speakers, headphones, or a stereo amplifier. Joystick/MIDI Connects a joystick for a gaming or MIDI device. Internal CD Audio Connects the sound card to your computer s internal CD-ROM board (this port isn t externally visible when the board is installed). Sound drivers provided in Linux come from many sources. However, as previously mentioned, Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is the sound system that is integrated into the 2.6 kernel. You may find older OSS (Open Sound System) drivers are useful if ALSA does not support your sound card. Commercial support for OSS drivers is available for a small cost from 4Front Technologies (www.opensound.com), which is the company that still maintains OSS. Before you install a separate sound driver distribution, check to see if your current distribution already has a recent driver. Using the driver that came with the kernel is always a safe bet if you are not experiencing a specific driver-related issue. At times, a sound application will ask you to identify the device from which to access sound on your system. With the introduction of the Udev feature in the 2.6 kernel, some of the device names are different from those used with the 2.4 kernel. The following are audio device nodes that may be of interest to you as you use sound in Linux: . /dev/audio, /dev/audio1 Compatible with Sun workstation audio implementations (audio files with the .au extension). These devices are not recommended for new sound applications. Under Udev, these devices are symbolic links to /dev/sound/audio and /dev/sound/audio1, respectively. . /dev/cdrom Represents your first CD-ROM drive. /dev/cdrom is usually a symbolic link to the device node, such as /dev/hdc, that corresponds to your CD-ROM drive. Additional CD-ROM drives are located at /dev/cdrom1, /dev/cdrom2, and so on. Caution
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510 Part IV . Running Applications Just to make things clear, while the codecs just discussed do not include built-in DRM features, some codecs are specifically designed to integrate with DRM solutions. In other words, all of these codecs can theoretically be used to play encoded content on a Linux system. If the content is protected by a DRM solution, the likelihood that the content is playable on a Linux system is fairly remote. Despite this fact, or perhaps because of it, Linus Torvalds has not excluded the possibility of including support for DRM in Linux. Likewise, several open source projects are working on Linux DRM solutions. Playing Music With an understanding of the challenges and advances in digital media under your belt, let s move on to actually putting digital media to use. This section shows you how to set up your Linux installation for audio playback. It examines the process for getting the hardware up and running and then explores available software options for audio playback. Setting Up Audio Cards To start your quadraphonic wall of sound, you need to have a sound card in your PC. A sound card can be an add-in PCI (or even ISA) card, or it can be integrated on your motherboard. Your card will have a ton of uses from gaming to audio/video playback. Having a multimedia system just isn t the same without sound. Fortunately most modern PCs include a sound card, often of the integrated variety. In the rare case that one isn t included (or the slightly more common case where it isn t supported in Linux), you can add a supported sound card starting for only a few dollars. If you re really pinched, check out eBay, where you probably can get a decent SoundBlaster (still the standard) compatible card for next to nothing. If you try the procedures in this book but still don t have a working sound card, visit the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture at www.alsa-project.org, home of the ALSA sound architecture. ALSA is the preferred sound software for Linux and is built into the Linux kernel itself (beginning with the 2.6 kernel). The ALSA site offers support, information, and help. The following list summarizes the basic features that are included in the popular SoundBlaster family of sound cards: . Sound recording and playback The card can convert analog sound into 8-bit or 16-bit digital numbers. To convert the sound, the board samples the sound in waves from 5 KHz to 48 KHz, or 5,000 to 48,100 times per second. The higher the sampling rate, the better the sound and larger the output files. Note
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Chapter 20 . Playing Music and Video 509 the time. Some of the key technologies that reflect improvements in how audio and video codecs have improved include: . Ogg Vorbis This audio codec has been developed as a freely available tool no patents or licensing needed. Ogg is the data container portion of the codec, and Vorbis is the audio compression scheme. There are other compression schemes that can be used with Ogg such as Ogg FLAC, which is used for archiving audio in a lossless format, and Ogg Speex, which is used to specifically handle encoding speech. . Real Networks Real has developed a set of audio and video codecs that have amazing ability to serve up streaming content. This protocol is not widely supported by anyone but Real. The Helix project produces a player for Linux that enables playback of Real media encoded files. . WMA Windows Media Audio is used to create high-quality digital audio. WMA is considered a lossless codec, which means the audio doesn t lose quality or data as a result of repeated compression-decompression cycles. Among its other benefits is that it s one of the first widely used codecs to support digital surround sound. . WMV Windows Media Video is used, not surprisingly, to encode and decode video. This is also a very high-quality encoder and is billed to produce a video that is half the size of an MPEG-4 encoded video at a comparable quality level. . DivX This video codec has revolutionized digital video. Extremely highquality video can be stored with amazingly small file sizes when using this codec. DivX (Digital Video Express) is based on the MPEG-4 video standard and can produce 640 480 video about 15 percent of the size of the source DVD material. Some of these codecs are integral parts of Digital Rights Management (DRM) scenarios. For example, WMA, WMV, and DivX have elements that support DRM. DRM is basically proprietary copy protection. The term DRM applies to a wide range of technologies that use server-based activation, encryption, and other elements to control who can access content and what they can then do with the content once it has been accessed. While it is very attractive to distributors of audio and video, who are trying to prevent unchecked digital piracy of their content, it can be a real stumbling block for the consumer. Many DRM solutions require proprietary software and even hardware to work with the protected content. A prime example is the recent production of some DRM-protected audio CDs, particularly in Europe. Some of these disks will not play in older standalone CD players, some will play only on a computer that supports the DRM application on the CD itself, and (especially frustrating) some will not play on a computer at all.
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