I bought some CD's from Best Buy today and I wanted to load them in my /home/carlos/MP3 director in Linux but have never done this before/ When I put the audio CD in, Fedora opens "CD Player for Gnome 2.8.0. I like to use XMMS for all audio listening on my machine but dont know how to tell Linux that I want to back up the cd to lised directory.

Thanks for any help please

So what exactly are you asking? how to rip CD's or change the extention so XMMS opens MP3s? Or both perhaps!?

Well I guess its a 2 part question. Will XMMS only read the CD if it is converted to MP3 format and what can I use to conver the disk to MP3's and then back them up on my MP3 directory.

try using one of those popular linux programs, RipperX works fine for me. There is a way to just make KDE convert the cd to mp3s but I forgot how something like going to the mnt/cdrom/mp3 and KDE will make a virtual directory of mp3s for that cd. As for XMMS I'm really not sure, try right clicking the file and select "open with" then type in XMMS and select "remember this application association..." also do that for the actual CD files.

if you want to rip the cds to mp3s and keep them on yoru hard drive user ripperX or grip they both work fine. if you want to play the cd in xmms go to open new dir and browse to /mnt/cdrom or wherever your cds get mounted. it looks liek you are using FC3 so it should be /media/cdrom. if you need to enable digiital audio extracton right click xmms and go to options -> preferences and highlight the cd player plugin and click configure

I think something is wrong with Fedora 3 because when I browse to the one and only CDROM drive I have, I am not able to see any files on the disk. This happens sometimes. Does that mean that Fedora can't understand the media that is on the disk or it thinks the disk is empty? CDPlayer reads the tracks and the titles but I hear no audio. XMMS audio is fine. I don't know how to tell XMMS to go to the CDROM drive and read the media on the CD.

The feature the guys were talking about was is KDE, there is an audio cd browser plugin that will show you all the tracks in wav/ogg(default) and mp3 format if a decoder like lame is installed in konqueror under the services->audio cd browser tab. The cd tracks should not be displayed in /media/cdrom if you use gnome's file browser (nautilus), and FC3 use gnome by default. They will be displayed if you use xmms, in the playlist window there is a button in the bottom to load files/dirs in the playlist. If the cd Audio player plugin is enabled in xmms preferencies and configured for this cdrom drive you shall see, (only through the xmms "load files/dirs" window) virtual audio files: Track1,.... like in windows, and you may add them in the playlist.

i wasnt talking about kde i was talking about xmms. you cant see the audio tracks from any browser in /media/cdrom unless it is mounted which it shouldnt be to get it to play in xmms. what i meant was within xmms tell it to open or add dir and then browse to /media/cdrom which then should show the tracks ont he playslist in xmms

You can use a program called grip to digitally extract the tracks and save the data as either wav, flac, ogg, or if you must have bad sound quality mp3. The program grip uses console programs like cdda2wav, cdparanoia, mp3enc, flac, oggenc, and many others to make the files.

There are many other programs that does the same as grip. Use all of them to find out which one works best for you.

BTW, it is not illegal to rip the tracks from an audio CD just for you, but it is illegal if you share them.

Ok, this is very confusing. # 1, how do I know if the only CDROM drive I have with the CD is mounted? I can see an Icon on my desktop that says "audio disk" so I think I can be safe to assume this is mounted. I would think that if I double click this icon, Gnome would be smart enough to open this CD directory and show me all the files on the disk but for some reason it decides to open CDPLAYER and start playing them.

My Linux has no directory called /media/cdrom. The only directory in /media is /media/cdrecorder and when I "ls" that dir, it shows its empty...???

An Audio CD Can't be mounted!!!!! It contains No filesystem. You don't mount audio cd's. You just play them....
Go To xmms preferencies and look if Audio CD Plugin is configured for /media/cdrecorder.

There is no Audio cd Directory. The Track 1, track2 ...etc you see on windows do not exist. They are virtual files, it's the way windows choose to be able to play tracks. If you see the properties you'll se that they all have the same size!!! Because windows choose to display Audio CD's like this does not mean that every OS should do this. In the preferencies menu you can disable autoplay, and you can choose whatever player to associate with the audio cd's. You can see those virtual tracks with xmms I'll say it again if you enable and configure the Audio cd Player plugin in the preferencies menu of xmms, but try to open up your mind. This is not windows, and things in Linux do not work the same way. It does not mean that Linux should do the things the same way windows do, only because you have used windows for too many hours and learned things this way!!!!!