Posts Tagged ‘audio cds’

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 😉

How to play Audio music CDs in GNU/Linux and Free/Net/Open BSDs

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

If you still have some old dusty CDs left on the CD shelf, its quite cool to give it a ride in a rainy morning.

As I enjoy working in console so much, I thought it might be interesting to share how music audio CDs can be listened in plain text mode console.

For all console / terminal geeks Linux and BSDs can be equipped with a number of text/console audio cd console players.

There are plenty of free software console cd audio players on the net, however I found cdplay , cdcd and dcd to be the most popular ones.

On Debian and Ubuntu G*/Linuces cdplay and cdcd are installable via apt. To install cdtool:

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install cdtool
...

cdtool package, contains a number of commands enabling you to listen/stop/shuffle/eject/get info about cd audio volumes. cdtool provides the following binaries:

cdeject
cdclose
cdir
cdinfo
cdpause
cdplay
cdstop
cdvolume
cdshuffle

Install cdcd on Debian and alike by typing:

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install cdcd
...

cdcd has shell like interface the most basic use of it is with:

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# cdcd
cdcd> play

To play audiocds in console on FreeBSD , a command tool dcd is available and installable through ports.
To install it issue:

root@freebsd# cd /usr/ports/audio/dcd
root@freebsd# make install clean
...

dcd is also available for Linux but on most GNU/Linuxes it has to be built from source.

Lets say you'd like to Play the 5th song from audio CD:

freebsd# dcd 5

dcd has plenty of great arguments, to get some fun with it check the man page.

Another program that can be used to play audio CDs on both Linux and BSDs is the "classical" mplayer .

To play AUDIO CD with mplayer the command line to use is:

root@debian:~# mplayer -cdrom-device /dev/sr0 cdda:// -cache 5000
...

The argument -cache 5000 has to be passed to to work around choppy sound (if for example audio playback interruptions every few milliseconds).

For people who are keen on ncurses (Midnight Commander) like command line interfaces you might enjoy Herrie a minimalistic music player that supports plenty of sound formats, including audiocds.

Herrie is available for Debian and most deb based modern distros via apt, e.g.:

root@xubuntu-desktop:~# apt-get install herrie
...

Herrie Minimalistic Music player for Linux and BSD


Ports are also available for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
To install on FreeBSD:

root@freebsd# cd /usr/ports/audio/herrie
root@freebsd# make install clean

I'll be happy to hear feedback and recommendations on any other console audio cd players I might forgot to mention.
Which is your favourite console text based cd audio player?