Anyone knows a FLAC player for Slack <= 12.0?
 

kernel 2.6.21.5, slackaware 12.0

Hi:
What's said.

Do you mean audio player that supports FLAC? For X or for command line? For cli you could use moc. If you use kde just try amarok.

Anyway - is there a reason for still using slackware 12.0?

The stock Slackware 12.0 came with audacious, xine, gxine, and KDE, which came with amarok, juk, noatun, kaboodle, ksCD (CD player). Read the PACKAGES.TXT file to find a complete list of apps.

If I recall correctly from other threads, you are running 12.0 to learn Slackware while using older hardware. KDE apps therefore might not seem like a palatable option. Yet I run Slackware 12.2 with KDE 3.5.10 installed on both a spare Pentium I and II computer. KDE 3.5.10 is a bit sluggish with respect to starting apps but the apps run fine when started. Of course, KDE apps can be run without running the entire K desktop environment.

Out of curiosity, on the Pentium I machine I just now successfully tested playing a flac file with amarok, juk, noatun, kaboodle, xine, gxine, and audacious. The flac file is located on an NFS mount from another computer and yet played on that older hardware with all of the X multimedia apps without skipping or related issues. :)

I also tested on the same machine with no problems an audio CD using KsCD.

This testing was with 12.2 but I don't think 12.0 will be much different.

If you are willing to build non stock apps for Slackware, there is mplayer, kaffeine (KDE), and others as well. Check slackbuilds.org for those apps. :)

Others will have to help for listing CLI multimedia apps.

Cli always preferable. The reason is old hardware/improperly tuned OS.

I've read PACKAGES.TXT a hundred an one times by now. And /var/log/packages/* too. Something must be very badly set in my box, for appls such as gxine, amarok, noatun do not work well in it. But that's the price for using Slack. One must know.

With gxine I went to the extreme of erasing the appl starter, so in about:plugins I have it no longer. I was always meddling in the way. And mplayer, the movie player, I'm tired of it. Such a monster, taking hours and hours to compile and not being able to play a simple CD without skipping, while ksCD has no problem at all. So I keep it for the rare instances where I want to watch a picture.


You remember well. I run Slack 12.0 in an old machine, Pentium III. And also have a Pentium I, my first machine beyond 80486.

As for my question, I already found the answer. The powerful sox. It plays just about anything, inclusive of FLAC. But my new philosophy is, for every audio format, to stick to the simplest program. E.g., for MPEG, mpg123 or mpg321. My only concern is CDDA. If I do not want to start X, I must fall back on poorly tested programs, not included by Slackware in its distros.

Thanks very much for your feedback.

I'd recommend MOC (I use it myself for mp3/FLAC every day): http://moc.daper.net/

It's curious. In my system moc is Thanks for the link.

That's a different moc :).

The player that has been recommended (which is great and which was a heavy influence on my own) has an executable filename of mocp.

As mentioned moc will play them or there is flac123 which is a flac only command line player.

I would recommend cmus instead of moc for ultimate vi keybind power.
Much better, developed & complete overall too.

Compressed music rules, seems to be the motto. For I can't find a single cli program for the playing of a humble CDDA. There still is workbone, but for some reason it is difficult to make it run. I mean a special purpose program.

As for the thread matter, the modest 'play' command, belonging to the sox package, is good enough for me, for the time being. Although moc's property of using a separate thread, thus avoiding underflows, seems an excellent thing. As well as avoiding the omnipresent playlists. Just consider listening Mozart's requiem, over 60m of music. What do you need the playlist for? Perhaps to listen Beethoven's nine symphonies one after the other?

Thanks a lot for the suggestions.

A text-mode cd player?

adcd
cdcd

Mplayer works too (mplayer cdda://...)

"Workbone" belongs to a different era. Back in the old days, cdrom drives would have audio circuits and an audio cable that ran directly to your sound card. (I still have one in my spares box with a volume dial and headphone jack on the front of it). 'workbone' was designed to work with those types of drives. Effectively all it does is issue play,pause,next,previous,stop commands to the drive and doesn't get involved with the audio data side of it at all. In fact, if your shutdown command just did a halt and didn't power-off the PC (which was the case in the pre APM days), you could issue a shutdown -h and it would even keep playing after the system had halted.

Modern drives don't have these features (probably dropped to cut costs), and you need a cd player app that can extract the data digitally and then send it to the kernels sound system in software.

In short, unless you're running ancient hardware, there's absolutely no use for workbone.

Thank God, I have two of these "ancient" drives, because I'm writing a program to play from t1 to t2, any two instants within a track, and to add subtleties when I wish. Digital extraction would complicate the program. By the way, I can extirpate the useless freedb-server thing.

Of course, digital extraction might be better than analog from the viewpoint of hi-fi, but I'm not sure how digital signals inside a computer can interfere with the very low audio frequencies. Of course they generate a lot of electromagnetic noise but can the ear detect it?

I recently bought a Philips optical drive and, to my surprise, it says on the top of the case: NO AUDIO OUTPUT. I thought, What a cheap product I got. How naive.

A drive with analog output can be used, hobbyist thing, to make a stand-alone player with only a microcontroller attached to its bus. But one had to trust the quality of the builtin audio stages.

Anyway, workbone comes with slack 12.0 (I knew it in a slack with kernel 2.2.16) and it is the only tool for listening CDDA in that version. I think I'll give it a new try.

You mentioned APM. When I boot, a quater of the messages have to do with ACPI. And all settings are made for a portable computer. I remember once I disposed of it, but now I don't remember how. Good bye.

Sadly, MOC 2.5.0-alpha4 crashes here with some mp3-s saved from internet radios. MOC 2.4.4 runs more stable, though still hangs when played continously, like over a night or so, its development seems stalled. Still using it, because cmus is better for large music collections, which i don't have.