Posts Tagged ‘cdda’

Fix audioCD play problems with VLC on GNU Linux

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

I've not played audio CD for ages. Anyways I had to set up one computer with Linux just recently and one of the requirements was to be able to play audiocds.
I was surprised that actually a was having issue with such as simple tasks.
Here is how i come with this article.

If you encounter errors playing Audio CDs on any Linux distro in VLC or other players, you might need to apply the following fix.

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras
...
root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
...

I'm not sure if this packages are required, anyways having them installed is a good idea especially on computers which will have to support as much multimedia as possible.

Trying to play a CD with VLC the result was not nice, you see in the picture above the error that poped up while trying it with VLC:

Due to wrong configuration of the play device VLC will be looking to read the audio cd from.

To succesfully play the audiocd invoke VLC command with a cdda///dev/sr0 argument like so:

hipo@xubuntu-desktop:~$ vlc cdda:///dev/sr0
...

To permanently fix the error you will have to edit ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc :

Inside ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc find the lines:

dvd=/dev/cdrom

Substitute the above line with:

dvd=/dev/sr0

Next find the line:

vcd=/dev/cdrom

Change the above line with:

vcd=/dev/sr0
Due to a bug in generating vlcrc , the dvd= might be set also to other messy unreadable characters (different from /dev/cdrom). This can also be the reason why it fails to properly read the disc.

If dvd= and vcd is set to a different unreadable characters delete them and substitute with /dev/sr0 .I've experienced this on Xubuntu Linux with a Bulgarian localization (probably the bug can be seen in other Linuxes when GNOME is installed in Russian, Chineese and other UTF-8 languages.

The strange error can be observed also in other players when the localization is set to someone's native language …
Alternative solution is to install and use rhythmbox instead of VLC.
Other program to play audio CDs called workman , you will have to get used to the interface which uses gtk1 and therefore obsolete. Putting aside the ugly interface it works 😉