On my laptop, I don't play music, and I've never messed with the sound. Never even installed ALSA. It does have some dinky built-in speakers, tho, and I do store music on it as a back-up. When I started looking into this question, I noticed the sound driver is OSS. I guess it installed that driver from the kernel during installation.

I've noticed that when I hover the mouse cursor over an mp3 icon, it starts playing the song. "Pretty neat," I thought, so I tried it on the desktop, which uses ALSA and sounds great thru nice speakers. No go!

Anybody know how to set that up on purpose? Is it a driver function, or is there a Gnome or Linux setting that makes it work?

that is pretty neat - now i'm both jealous and curious; so if anyone has the why's and wherefore's, please share.


cheers,

Still puzzling over this. I think it may have something to do with gstreamer. I noticed that the laptop had version .10 installed, but the desktop did not ... only .08.

I installed all kinds of .10 tools, utilities, libraries, and whatever else seemed to have potential. Still nothing.

Went into Gnome configuration, and could find no reference to gstreamer .10. Gnome seemed only to know about .08. On the laptop, Gnome configuation references, both.

Peripheral question ... Should I have both, or delete version .08, and why didn't version .10 come down automatically on a dist-upgrade?

I'm running Gnome, version 2.12, for whatever that's worth.

Hey, rickh, glad I can help. This is possible using gnome nautilus file manager. There is an option in edit >> preferences >> preview >> preview sound files. The app which is used for this is mpg123.

I had already tried that. It doesn't work. I should have noted that the machine it doesn't work on is my AMD64. It's possible that AMD64 just hasn't caught up with this feature yet, because it was the default behavior on the 32-bit laptop.