Linux features on Harry Potter Audio CDs?

Plutonius · 10-15-2007, 08:45 AM

Trying to make MP3 versions of my 17 Harry Potter Deathly Hallows CDs (Listening Library ISBN 978-0-7393-6038-5). While ripping with KAudioCreator did work, I wanted to combine the files into "one CD per file" so my player would not skip around. On a whim I viewed the CD contents in Konqueror and found to my surprise the following folders "CDA, FLAC, ,Full CD, Information, MP3, Ogg Vorbis" as well as 17 .wav files. The folders do not show up in WinXP explorer even with "show hidden files" selected. The so named folders show MP3 and OGG files and the "Full CD" folder shows full-length CD files in MP3, OGG and FLAC.

The total of these file sizes is way over the capacity of a CD.

Drag and drop to copy the "Full MP3" file to desktop results in a copying dialog box that shows copying at 35k/sec speed which eventually produces a larger than originally reported file size (100Mb actual vs 86Mb in the folder) MP3 file which plays the whole CD perfectly.

Now it is pretty obvious to me that the "copy" function is really converting on the fly from the .WAV to .MP3.

My question is: where is the software that is doing this? I have SuSE 10.2 installed and don't know how an audio CD could cause my system to do what it is doing. Is there some sort of Linux script or software on these CDs?

I find this very interesting and would like to know if this is common in audio books and if anyone else has noticed this.

Please move post to more relevant forum or let me know of a more relevant website/blog/forum if any such exists.

David the H. · 10-15-2007, 01:23 PM

This is a nice little feature of the kde desktop environment. It's a konqueror plugin, kdemultimedia-kio-plugins if I remember correctly. They're virtual folders and yes, the files are only converted to the actual files when you copy them out to somewhere else. It's available for any CD that your system recognizes as an audio CD.

You can configure the encoder settings in the kde control center >> sound and multimedia >> audio CD tab.

Personally I usually prefer to use kaudiocreator myself though. It gives me more control over the output. And I'll drop back to command-line ripping if I want to do anything more complicated, like ripping to a single track.

Plutonius · 10-15-2007, 11:10 PM

Thank you David! This is one of the things I like about Linux. You don't have to research how to stop things you don't want to happen. Instead you have to search to find out how to operate things that are included with next to nil documentation.

I found a review that referred to it as: KIOSLAVE and said the shortcut to the settings is to type in the address bar Settings:/Sound/ . Works for me!

While I looked in the KDE Konqueror documentation supplied with SuSE 10.2 nowhere is any of this mentioned.
Somebody worked hard on this KIOSLAVE and whomever it is THANK YOU!