Hi everyone, I'm pretty new to Linux and am having a little trouble getting MP3's to play...

I'm running a multi-boot system with win98SE, winXP, and SuSE 9.3 Pro...

What I'm trying to do is get XMMS in SuSE to play my MP3 files that are on one of my FAT32 partitions. I keep trying to use the add files feature of the playlist to add the files from those directories and it doesn't seem to do anything at all. So then I wanted to try a different player and ran Beep Media Player but I don't have an MP3 input plugin for it and haven't been able to find one that doesn't complain about dependency issues (I'm using rpm packages, I haven't learned how to compile from source yet... know of any good tutorials for that that I could peruse at some later time?), namely it says something about my version of BMP being wrong, it says that GTK+ or something isn't installed (that's a development library or something for GUI programs yes?) and a number of others. I tried installing a different version of BMP and it also complained about GTK which seems odd to me because the BMP version that ships with SuSE 9.3 Pro doesn't seem to complain about such things, it just doesn't have a working MP3 input plugin.

Anyway, I really want to be able to listen to my music and I really dislike the playlist sorting methods in amaroK (a lot of my files don't have ID3 tags because I didn't have internet and CDDB access when I ripped them originally some 5 or 6 years ago... I was moving a lot at the time... and I haven't bothered to do it manually). So since amaroK seems to use only ID3 tags I don't like that and was hoping for another option.

Honestly all I really want is to get XMMS to work properly or a working MP3 input plugin for BMP.

Does anyone know if the shipping version of XMMS with SuSE 9.3 Pro is broken like the shipped version of xine? I got xine to work after uninstalling it and installing a new version from elsewhere... I might try that with XMMS also just to see.

Sorry if I seem like I'm rambling, but I hope I've at least made it clear what I'm after.

Also, I should probably note that I used to use Mandrake with the same hardware setup and also as multi-boot and never had trouble with XMMS but I could never get the 3d acceleration to work right for my nvidia gfx card... SuSE seems great for my gfx card, but I can't use XMMS yet

Anyway, that's all, I hope someone can help me out

Drake

I know that SUSE 9.3 had some legal issues and did not ship with support for mp3 but there are some patches you can get to restore mp3 compatability...

Don't know if that is your issue, however. Did you say Amarok was able to play the files? If so then it will be an xmms issue.

KC

I actually hadn't tried to play the files in amaroK because I didn't like the playlist interface and didn't want to bother with it... I tried just now and it will not play MP3's either, when I tell it to play an MP3 file from the playlist it highlights the listing a pinkish red color in the playlist and does not play it. It doesn't report an error or anything, but neither does XMMS.

So you are probably right, it is probably an issue with SuSE... where can I find the patches? (I didn't see anything listed in YOU but I suppose I wouldn't, I mean if they didn't include MP3 support deliberately, they wouldn't be likely to offer patches automatically).

Thanks for the response

Drake

I don't have SUSE so I have not had to update anything for mp3... Maybe someone in LQ who has done it with 9.3 can jump in and give an easy way to update.

You might try this first in root:
yast xmms-mp3 (is that right?)
or
if you have apt-get:
apt-get install xmms-mp3

Or maybe do an Online update...

KC

well I tried the standard Yast Online Update (YOU) for updates but it didn't come up with anything for it. That didn't really surprise me as YOU is generally for OS and hardware driver updates I think. I have XMMS and BMP both installed from the base installation CD's for SuSE 9.3 Pro but I haven't tried to use the installs for those programs from someone/somewhere else.

I was hoping to find rpm packages for them both at packman because that's where I got the packages for xine which allows me to watch my DVD's despite the fact that SuSE broke their version of it, but there aren't rpms for XMMS or BMP yet for 9.3.

I picked up the source code for XMMS but I don't really know how to compile it yet, which is one of the reasons I asked about a tutorial (I found a couple of websites that have info about it that might work out ok for me, so I'll try those later.

Otherwise, anyone else know what I can do?

Thanks for the replies kencaz

Drake

to compile it from source unpack it using a gui or youcould use tar. if its a .gz file type tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz if its bz2 do tar -xvjpf filename.tar.bz2 once you get it unpacked cd into the directory and type:
./configure

make

make install

thats all you have to go assuming everything goes right.