Another CD Audio Question
 

Okay, I'm completely new to this Linux thing and honestly I'm yet to see its advantages but I'm willing to give it more than 24 hours, just because its New Year's and I'm feeling nice.

Biggest problem I'm facing at the moment is my inability to change an audio cd and have it play. It booted with one in it and that worked fine, until I swapped it out for another cd, upon which any attempts to play any of the tracks, result in it sounding all corrupted and stuff, like if part of a downloaded song gets corrupted but this is like completely corrupted.

The program I'm using is Xmms because I think I suffer from the lack of audio cable between cdrom and sound card (I've done some reading) and its the Fedora Core 2 version of Linux thingy. I have a feeling is something simple like I've gotta unmount some widget because that stuff is a bit vague with me (but I'm thinking it should mount and unmount itself automatically...). If its something more complex than that somebody'll need to give me a bit more of an idea of what I'll need to tell you.

Cheers and Happy New Year,
Josh D

You don't need to unmount an audio CD because it has no filesystem as such. I've had a bit of trouble with audio CDs as well but I just chmodded the device and it all seemed to work alright. I hardly use audio CDs since I generally purchase digital music so theres no need to play from any discs. Since you're using Fedora and are new I'll assume you're using either KDE or GNOME which both have daemons to recognise when you put a disc in the drive.

There is a plugin for XMMS which makes it play without the drive-to-sound card cable so maybe you could Google for that, other than that I'm probably not much help.

Hi ,
try using kscd (hit alt-f1 and type kscd, if you cant find it in the menu. You probably need to have kde installed. I am not sure if that is standard in Fedora).
Make sure you have "direct digital playback" (in the "extras -> configure kscd" dialog) enabled for it to work without the cable.
Good luck,
- drowstar

I don't think I have KDE, Core 3 has it but I only have 2. Normally I would use mp3s or some other digital media but its only a 4.5gig drive, half of which is taken up by Fedora, and I'd prefer not to fill the drive.

Would it be worth it to go for a scrounge for an analog cable, are there pros/cons of the cable verse direct digital? That is, pros/cons other than the obvious fact that digital doesn't seem to work...

Whats chmodding?

I'm thinking I'd probly get another smallish drive (5-10gig) for cheap from somewhere and chuck junk like my mp3s on there, because then i can have all my cds accessible at once, rather than swapping them. Even still I'd like to fix this problem, no music makes the computer close to useless for me.

Josh D

to play a cd with xmms,
remove the old tracks that are in xmms playlist,
use the add button of xmms to browse to /mnt/cdrom, and you will see the tracks (in the form of virtual files like in windows) and insert those files in xmms playlist.

In redhat/fedora distros KDE is not by default selected to be installed.
You should have ticked it in packet selection screen when you installed fc2.
If you did a default instalation which is bad since you wont even have compilers (the development packages are not by default installed) you don't have it.
try using the Add/remove packages tool that comes with fc2 or install the suitable rpm's manualy from the cd's .

I now have at least some aspects of KDE but I don't think it included kscd though. I tried the removing then adding the tracks.

Still no go. I'm gonna see if I can find the cable tomorrow.

Anybody help? What am I missing?

Josh D

Do you actually see the tracks at that point?

//Side Note/suggestion:
I prefer the application "Grip" to play CD's.
//Side Note.

Cool

in xmms preferencies, there is an input plugin called CD Audio. Configuring the plugin will let u choose between digital
or analog playback. With digital you don't need the cable. Also check the mixer settings of Gnome. By default xmms uses OSS mixer and you have ALSA (the OSS is emulated) and you can't adjust the volume through xmms. So check the global mixer settings.

I've configured XMMS so that its using direct digital playback, there's no problem with volume, I found the mixer thingy and my stereo has more than enough gain for the output volume. The problem is its amplifying distortion.

MasterC: I had a go at installing GRIP but its missing some files it needs, which are apparently contained in libghttp, which I also downloaded but couldn't install. I did some ./configure thing and it came up with a few things missing: aclocal, autoconf, automake, autoheader; which I think means that it can't do the 'make' thingy.

I can't see that tracks if I try to browse to the drive through the gui but i can add specific tracks through XMMS itself. Is that what you meant? XMMS can add/remove and see the tracks fine, it just stuffs up on playback.

Josh D

well, of course!!! I told you that if you have done a default installation then you don't have the development package installed. (make, gcc etc). Try downloading an rpm version for fedora core 2 instead of downloading the source.
You install a package with the command

rpm -ihv <package name>

Yes that's what i meant.

I'm installing just about all the development stuff that Fedora shipped with, so hopefully something there will help me install something else. My old man did the install while I was out and only put on a few of the bare essentials, so I'm putting a lot of stuff on that he missed.

I've installed a few rpm packages before (XMMS was rpm) but this libghttp thing came as a .tar.gz thingy and the contents needed to be compiled before installing, I think.

Crikey, sure Linux might be stable and secure but its a real sod to use. At least its cheap.

Josh D

Crikey eh? :D

It's not that bad actually, it's got a learning curve, but what doesn't? A good package management system makes installing applications dependencies invisible to the user, or at least, far less involved.

Not too get too far off topic...

If you've got the development tools installed (make, gcc...) I'd stilll go for Grip. Although, XMMS is great, I prefer Grip for quite a few reasons, I think one of the biggest is that while I'm listening to a CD, if the song is one that I'd like to have more readily available, I can rip the song extremely quickly and easily. It has the ability to use a DB backend... the list goes on. XMMS certainly has it's place, but for CD listening, I really think Grip is the way to go.

Cool

I may also give grip a try.
I used to compile things from source, but after a while i realized it's a little bit confusing (although a lot better to compile the source) in distro's that use rpm, because u don't have a clear picture of what you have installed. Also uninstalling is a problem. I had installed Windowmaker from the official site, and then to uninstall it, i had to find the source again from an forgotten backup cd, ./configure and make uninstall. The problem is with some programs Makefiles, that do not offer a make uninstall option. You have to read the Makefile, or keep a log-file, to find and erase all the files manually.
Hopefully, i'll switch to slackware 10 next week (everybody says that it's it's the best distro) and compile everything from source :).

Some links for grip in rpm for fc2 i've found:
http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrp.../linux/2/grip/
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/grip/

I've installed GRIP but its not working either. Does it use the analog by default? If so, how do I change it to digital, because I can't find anything that looks like it'll work.

Josh D

The sound in linux is worse that in windows since Alsa is a quit new project still under development. OSS has really good sound but is not free any more i think (or maybe only the basic system is free, no 4 speaker support, no 5,1 etc. ) this is why they started developing ALSA.
If you play a little with the volumes in the mixer you'll get a good result. Don't raise all the volumes to 100%.

When i had RH8 i had really good sound but only the 2 speakers worked. So i downloaded ALSA, and i was shocked!!! The sound was awful although all 4 speakers worked, so I uninstalled it.
Nowdays fedora 2 comes with ALSA by default, but the mixers let you configure things to have a better result. Do not expect to have a crystal sound in a very high volume, like you do in windowz but things are getting better every day.