There are many ways to listen to your favorite music tracks.
Either play a CD or play digitized versions of them. The following
section features some CD player applications as well as some
applications that can be used for digitizing audio CDs.
IMPORTANT: CDDA and Analog CD Playback
There are two different ways of playing audio CDs. CD and
DVD drives capable of analog CD playback read the audio data and
send it to the sound output device. Some external drives
connected via PCMCIA, FireWire, or USB need to use CDDA (Compact
Disk Digital Audio) to extract the audio data first then play it
as digital PCM. The players featured in the following sections
do not support CDDA. Use XMMS if you need CDDA support.
19.3.1 KsCD—Audio CD Player
KsCD is an easy-to-use audio CD player. Press
F2
and enter kscd to start the
application. KsCD integrates into your KDE panel and can be
configured to start playing automatically after a CD has been
inserted. To access the configuration menu, select . Fetch album and track information from a CDDB
server on the Internet if KsCD is configured accordingly. You
can also upload CDDB information to share it with others. Use
the dialog for information retrieval and
upload.
19.3.2 Compressing Audio Data: Ripping
Audio compression can be handled by various tools. The
following sections feature a command line approach to encoding
and playing audio data as well as some graphical applications
capable of audio compression.
Command Line Tools for Encoding and Playback of Audio
Data
Ogg Vorbis (package
vorbis-tools) is a free audio
compression format that is now supported by the majority of
audio players and even portable MP3 players. The Web page of
the project is https://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis.
Your system comes with several tools supporting
Ogg Vorbis. oggenc is a command line tool
used for encoding WAV files to Ogg. Just run oggenc
myfile.wav
to transform a given
.wav file into Ogg Vorbis. The
-h option displays an overview of the other
parameters. Oggenc supports encoding with a variable bit rate.
In this way, an even higher degree of compression can be
achieved. Instead of the bit rate, specify the desired quality
with the parameter -q. -b
determines the average bit rate. -m and
-M specify the minimum and maximum bit
rate.
ogg123 is a command line Ogg player. Start it with a
command like ogg123
mysong.ogg.
Compressing Audio Data Using KAudioCreator
KAudioCreator is a lean CD ripper application
(see Figure 19-3). Once
started, it lists all the tracks of your CD in the tab. Select the tracks to rip and encode.
To edit the track information, use the under . Otherwise just start the ripping and encoding
with . Watch the progress of these jobs using the
tab. If configured accordingly,
KAudioCreator also generates playlist files for your selection
that can be used by players like amaroK, XMMS, or Helix Banshee.
Compressing Audio CDs Using Konqueror
Before you start the actual ripping process with
Konqueror, configure the handling of audio CDs and the Ogg
Vorbis encoder in the KDE Control Center. Select . The configuration module is divided into three
tabs: , ,
and . Normally, a
suitable CD device is detected automatically. Do not change
this default setting unless the autodetection failed and you
need to set the CD device manually. Error correction and
encoder priority can also be set here. The tab determines the quality of the
encoding. To configure online lookup of album, track, and
artist information for your ripped audio data, select
.
Start the ripping process by inserting the CD into the
CD-ROM drive and entering audiocd:/ in the
bar. Konqueror then lists the
tracks of the CD and some folders (see Figure 19-4).
To keep uncompressed audio data on your disk, just select
the .wav files and drag them into another
Konqueror window to copy them to their final destination. To
start the Ogg Vorbis encoding, drag the Ogg
Vorbis folder or files from this folder to another
Konqueror window. The encoding starts as soon as you drop the
Ogg Vorbis folder at its destination.
