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Groovin’ to Tunes with CD Player
Imagine that you’re sitting alone, working at your computer. Or, you could be reading a book that’s boring you. It’s Saturday night too, of course. What a drag. Want some diversion? Perhaps some music? We can’t provide music, but we can show you how to use your computer to listen to some tunes.In the following sections, we show you the tools Red Hat Linux provides to make your workstation into a sound system, including all the necessary applications to play CDs, and tools for connecting your PC to a sound card and speakers. Start by making sure that your computer can play music.
Setting up your sound system
Red Hat Linux should have automatically configured your computer’s sound system during the post installation process we describe in Chapter 3. However, you may run into problems — especially on older computers — so Red Hat provides a sound card detection utility.
You can configure and test your sound card at the same time by following these steps:
Log in to your Linux computer, click the GNOME Menu button, and choose System SettingsSoundcard Detection.
Enter the root password, if prompted.The Audio Devices window opens, as shown in Figure 11-2.
Click the Play test sound button.
If you hear some mellow music, your computer is ready to rock.
Click OK and you’re ready to go.
Figure 11-2: A sample Audio Devices window.
If you’re plugged in correctly and you repeated the steps, but still didn’t hear any sound, one of these reasons may explain why:
Your computer has an old, unrecognizable sound card.
You don’t have a sound card.
Someone else’s stereo is way too loud.
You definitely have to purchase a sound card if you don’t have one. Using old sound cards is generally difficult, so we also recommend purchasing a replacement. We can’t help you much with the third possibility.TipThe Red Hat Esound daemon (referred to as ESD) is designed to allow multiple applications to use your computer’s sound system at the same time. Some-times, however, an application may not be able to take advantage of this elegant system. For example, when you start XMMS, you may have to turn off the ESD daemon. You can turn off ESD by starting a GNOME Terminal window and entering this command:
HUP esd
Playing CDs
Everyone wants a little music in their life. But you went ahead and bought a computer rather than a stereo system. D’oh! No problem: It happens that you indeed spent your money wisely because your Red Hat Linux computer functions well as a stereo system. This section describes how to set up your computer to play music CDs.Red Hat bundles two open source CD players for Linux users: CD Player and XMMS. We describe CD Player in this chapter because it automatically starts when you insert a CD in your computer. (We don’t ignore XMMS, however, because we show you in Chapter 12 how to use it to play Internet audio streams.)Anyway, these steps show how to start playing music:
Log in as any user and pop a CD into the CD drive.
The GNOME CD Player application appears.
Listen as your CD starts playing.
Those are the easiest steps in this book. However, if you exit from CD Player, you have to restart it manually (unless you insert another CD, in which case CD Player starts automatically again). You can start CD Player by clicking the GNOME Menu button and choosing Sound & VideoCD Player. Nothing to it!The CD Player controls should be familiar territory for anyone born in the 20th century. Here’s a quick refresher for those cavepeople out there:
To change the volume, click the vertical slide bar on the right side of the CD Player window. Hold the mouse button while you adjust the volume.
Click the crossed tools (a screwdriver and wrench) button, toward the middle-left area of the window, to open the Preferences window. You can then select how CD Player reacts when you start and stop it. You can also control the default CD device (the default is /dev/cdrom, but you many want to change it to /dev/cdrom1, or other devices, depending on your computer hardware). You can also select the theme of the CD Player skin. A simple help system is available too.
The remaining controls are self explanatory: start, stop, forward, yada-yada.
As you can see, playing CDs is pretty simple. Note that in Chapter 12 we show you how to use simple XMMS and the general-purpose MPlayer players to play Internet music streams and files.
