My main concern is gaining the ability to select a list of mp3s on my hdb1 and hdb3 ntfs partitions to play in one or the other of the players. I have installed mplayer, and xmms, both of which seem to be operating well enough, but they will only allow selection of one file at a time. This problem seems to roll over into building playlists as well.

The greater question is, although hdb1 and hdb3 ntfs partitions are mounted and I have access to them from the desktop, they don't appear in any menu anywhere. Is there a library or plugin or application available that will show these volumes in the menus and players?

While I'm asking, I might as well be greedy and ask is there is a way to enable surround sound?

In the XMMS Load Files dialog box, there should be "Add selected files" and "Add all files in directory" buttons. You should be able to hold <CTRL> and select multiple files then click "Add selected files". Also, in the text selection box, you can do stuff like "*.mp3<TAB>" and the file list should refresh to show only .mp3 files.

To find out where hdb1 and hdb3 are mounted, right-click the desktop icons and choose properties. It should tell you where it's located (in Gnome, for my music, the properties window shows "Location: /mnt" and "Name: music", so I can find the files in XMMS by changing to /mnt/music). You can also open a terminal and run mount, it'll show something like this
I don't know about the surround sound, though

--mascdman

mascdman, I continue to amaze myself just how blockheaded I can be at times.

I can only plea that after a few hours of stumbling around in this cryptic linux system and equally cryptic web sites purported to give information, the obvious and easy answer is easy to overlook.

Thank you so much

You're welcome

--mascdman

mascdman -- another XMMS question: How do I remove a directory from XMMS? In other words, I've got music files in a couple of different directories. I did the "play directory" option, but if I want to switch to another directory, the song list from the first directory persists, and the songs from the second directory get appended to it. So, in order to actually start hearing the songs from the second directory, I have to fast forward through all the songs in the first directory. How can I clear out the set of directories that XMMS knows about and start fresh? This obviously is a pretty minor issue but it's annoying as all get out. -- J.W.

In the playlist editor click Load List->New List (you'll have to click-and-hold otherwise the Load Playlist dialog opens). If you want to get rid of a specific set of songs, you can hold <SHIFT> and/or <CTRL> and use the mouse to select them in the Playlist Editor and then type <DEL>.

--mascdman