11.2.1. CD playing and copying
The cdp package comes with most distributions and
provides cdp or cdplay, a text-based CD player. Desktop managers
usually include a graphical tool, such as the gnome-cd player in Gnome, that can be started from a menu.
Be sure to understand the difference between an audio CD and a
data CD. You do not have to mount an audio CD into the file system
in order to listen to it. This is because the data on such a CD are
not Linux file system data; they are accessed and sent to the audio
output channel directly, using a CD player program. If your CD is a
data CD containing .mp3 files, you will
first need to mount it into the file system, and then use one of
the programs that we discuss below in order to play the music. How
to mount CDs into the file system is explained in
Section 7.5.5.
The cdparanoia tool from the package with
the same name reads audio directly as data from the CD, without
analog conversions, and writes data to a file or pipe in different
formats, of which .wav is probably the
most popular. Various tools for conversion to other formats,
formats, such as .mp3, come with most
distributions or are downloadable as separate packages. The GNU
project provides several CD playing, ripping and encoding tools,
database managers; see the
Free Software Directory, Audio section for detailed information.
Audio-CD creation is eased, among many others, with the
kaudiocreator tool from the KDE suite. It
comes with clear information from the KDE Help Center.
CD burning is covered in general in
Section 9.2.2.
