Slackware :: Audio CDs In KDE 4.x - Bunch Of .cda Tracks
May 28, 2010
I've run into something very interesting over the past several months with audio CDs and KDE 4.3.1. Background: I've got two computers running Slackware 13 --stable with Vincent Batts's KDE 4.3.1 packages. One of them is a desktop running Slackware64 and the other is a laptop running 32-bit Slackware. The two computers are running almost the same software too. I like to listen to audio books that I get from the library on my MP3 player. The vast majority of them are CD audio (as opposed to MP3 books), so the disks simply have a whole bunch of .cda tracks on them when I view them in Windows.
HOWEVER, when I view them in Dolphin or Konqueror, I get several folders offering the files in different formats. For instance, there's a folder for the individual tracks as .wav and another for .ogg files. The folder that I really like is one called something like "Full CD," which offers the whole disk in one file in four different formats. That's the one I like. I can get the whole disk in one OGG file so that an entire book is just 12 files on my Sanza. The only thing that seemed strange was that it took for freaking ever to "copy" from the CD to my hard drive.
I think I figure out what's going on! I think that Dolphin is actually calling K3B when I click on the audio CD and when I "copy" from the CD to the hard drive, it is actually encoding the .CDA files. The Problem(s)Until recently, the burn (if that's what it is) was slow on the 64-bit machine, but it worked. However, in the last week or so, it seems that the last few bytes of data to burn are taking forever (like an hour or more) to do so. I hear a strange clicking from my drive, so maybe that's the whole problem. I'm going to get a new drive and see what happens. The burn works well on my 32-bit laptop, but it doesn't recognize audio CDs when I insert them like the 64-bit desktop does. I need to open Dolphin and type 'audiocd:' in the toolbar for it to recognize the disk. Then everything works well. So: Am I understanding what's actually going on with audio CDs? Why does my desktop computer recognize audio CDs when they're inserted, but the laptop doesn't?
I've been using lxdvdrip to rip a couple of DVDs that I own to my hard drive; and I usually am able to use just one command and let it do its thing, instead of waiting for all the prompts ("Select audio tracks?", "Specify burn location?", etc), using something such as 'lxdvdrip -u=a -a=2 -fv=~/film-dvd -lang=en -bp=0'. The problem is that this will only work for movies that have English audio tracks, and I have quite a few movies in other languages. There's no way to simply predict what audio tracks a movie will have, short of playing it and cycling through them all.
There doesn't seem to be an lxdvdrip option to specify a language other than German, English or French; you have to choose it manually. Is there a way -- using lxdvdrip or something else on the command line -- to list the particular properties of a DVD, specifically what audio tracks it has? Something kind of like the "exiftool" command for listing EXIF data.
So I work off and on doing live sound work and I am interested in starting to record some of the shows I work on. Naturally I only run Linux based operating systems on my computers so I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good piece of hardware for recording 8-16 tracks that fully supports Linux. I have firewire and USB interfaces on my studio laptop.
I want to convert some audio files, to mp3 files. I have only k3b but it converts into ogg or wav. Is there any program to convert a track in mp3? r a k3b add-on?
My question would be this: is it possible to open different audio file tracks into the same piano roll, or even open multiple piano roll instances at the same time? If the answer is "no", then does anyone know a good LADSPA sampler plugin? Basically, I need to be able to load multiple samples into the same instrument and have them set to a range on the keyboard, similar to what the advanced sampler in Reason does.
Having multiple samples in the beat editor is not the same, as I need to control the note off (without re-loading the sample and just changing the end time, that is too cumbersome). If any of this seems weird I should specify that I am making breakcore music where drum beat samples are highly manipulated and a piano roll for each sample is just going to be too annoying to program.
I have two video files (Xvid) and would like to combine the video from one of these with the audio track of the other, in order to create a new video file.
This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I would like the resulting audio to be a mixture of the two original audio tracks, for instance, during some time segments, I would like to switch from one to the other, but the video should always be the same.
Another issue that complicates the things is that the two audio tracks have different bit rates, and when I briefly managed to merge the two, one of the audio tracks was playing much faster than the other. To clarify, the audio tracks should not overlap but just be played at the different time during the video playback.
I am trying to do this by using Audacity. The problem is that I am fairly new to Audacity and I have not been able to find any info in their user guides regarding this specific issue.
I've been googling this problem a lot these last couple of days, with no luck.The thing is, I need to record audio from an old Tascam four track cassette recorder. I have three tracks on the tape and I want to record them to three seperate tracks on the computer. I don't have and cannot afford a decent multi-track soundcard (one of the reasons I'm using the cassette recorder, another being really cool drum sound). This means I cannot record the tracks seperately and sync them afterwards, because the speed of each playback isn't 100% reliable.
I have a USB guitar link from Behringer, which I could use and has one mono plug. Pulse Audio picks that up as a seperate input and with Jokosher I can assign line-in left and right to two seperate tracks and the USB link to a third one. The problem is however that Jokosher constantly freezes up and I've never been able to make it work properly. So my question is: is there any other way/software I could use to record from two seperate audio sources?
I have fifteen Audio CDs - an Audiobook - that I haven't used in ages.
I would like to pass them on, but before doing that, I want to check whether they still work flawlessly.
Is there a Windows or Linux program that I can use to quality test a CD? Is possible, with a detailed explanation of any errors it may find, and whether they will cause problems listening to the CD?
I use abcde to rip and encode all my music. It works great especially the option of ripping an entire cd to one flac or mp3 file, this was great for Sleep's Jerusalem. Anyway I have a cd by the Melvins (the Maggot) which they famously split each track into two tracks midway through the song. I would like to know if there is a way to rip them into "whole" tracks?
I'm trying to bring my Slackware system back to life as my XP HDD is dying... I've got everything working except for my audio. I got a new motherboard (ASRock P43DE3) and it has a VIA VT1708S as the onboard audio. Is there any way I can get this working without rebuilding the kernel?
I am trying to listen to an audio cd but when I try to find it, either through an ikon on the desktop, (XFCE), or through a media player, -Amarok - vlc, the file manager, (Thunar), nor even ultimately the Terminal, can I find anything in the CD-rom drive when a music CD is played in it.I can easily copy the contents of the CD to my home directory using cdparanoia.When I place a CD with an ISO image or a DVD from Linux Format, for example, I have no problems opening or browsing them.I had also run alsaconf and it completed easily. But still nothing shows up, and the superblock error is still there.
I use Slackware full-time on my personal machine, a Lenovo T61, and I've used Slackware happily for the past 15 years. I've always been able to find answers to my questions by searching, but this time I'm stumped and find myself posting my first question ever to a help site. Recently installed Slackware 13.0 out of the box, which has KDE 4.2.4. I've added myself as a regular user, and made sure I'm a member of the audio and cdrom groups. I've configured sound with alsaconf and alsamixer, and sound works fine when playing digital files (audio and video). I can mount data CDs and DVDs, and read them with Dolphin. When I insert an audio CD, I can't get any application to see it, except for the "Last plugged in device" widget, which only gives me K3B as an option to rip the CD - no option to play the CD. If I allow K3B to launch, that application can see the tracks. KDE 4 does not have good support for playing audio CDs. I've seen various suggestions for fixes that relate to udev, HAL and adding actions. I'm out of my league here, as I'm a casual user, not one who can dive into these details. My guess is that udev is OK because K3B can see the audio CD. When I look at /usr/share/apps/solid/actions, I see the following:
There are no actions that appear to relate to start playing a CD, so I think this is where the problem lies, but I'm not sure, and if it is, I don't know how to fix it. Things have gotten a lot more complicated over the years...Playing an audio CD should be a simple task, and I'm embarrassed that it's taking so long to debug this problem.
I had this issue in Slackware64 13 but I had hoped that it would have been fixed in 13.1. I have my permissions setup correctly, I can even burn DVDs just fine, but every audio CD I try to burn in k3b gives me an unknown error with regard to cdrtools (254). It gives me this error at about 200mb of writing every single time, even when simulating the burn. Here is the error log that k3b puts out.
I recently upgraded to slackware 13, and I discovered that the only things I can do audio wise is play audio CD's and adjust mixer volumes. I have a DELL C600 with a Maestro 3i soundcard. I am able to use the laptops advanced volume controls and I even played with the builtin KDE4 mixer over and over again. I have also unloaded and reloaded drivers. Is there a step I am missing? I even tried to test a wave file with "aplay", and that program locks up until I hit ctrl+c.
I just noticed, that the fanfare that signals a successfully finished burn process in K3B is interrupted after the first three tones. How can I get back the fanfare in full length?
I am on Slackware64-current with all updates up to 2nd May, 2010.
Sounds like a trivial thing, but how do you do it? How do you play a plain red book audio CD? I have tried xmms, audacious and mplayer. The only success I have had (if you can call it that) is with the latter, mplayer. Using the command:
Code: mplayer -cdrom-device /dev/sr0 cdda://3 -cache 6000 I get the warnings:
Code: Cache not filling, consider increasing -cache and/or -cache-min! Cache not filling, consider increasing -cache and/or -cache-min!
The program plays the audio, but there is a huge latency prior to starting the playback, making it very cumbersome to change tracks and having to wait. I have tried with various cache values as well as using the "-cache-min" argument, to no avail. What values are certain to work?
As for xmms and audacious I get the errors: Audacious: When trying "audacious /dev/sr0"
Code: unix-io: read failed: Input/output error. MADPlug-Message: Rejecting file:///dev/sr0; cannot read from file. unix-io: read failed: Input/output error. unix-io: read failed: Input/output error. XMMS: When trying "xmms /dev/sr0": No error
It simply does nothing except starting up and not playing. My system is a 32-bit Slackware 13.1.0 on a fast x86. I have tried with different audio CDs.
I have a laptop that I want to connect to my stereo via USB, and I want the other computers on my network to be able to send sound to it somewhat transparently. By "transparently" I mean that I want to be able to send literally any audio that would go through my local speakers to the stereo via the network. As far as I know, PulseAudio can do this without rebuilding any multimedia packages. No one really has anything good to say about PulseAudio, though.
As of now I'm ready to wipe the laptop (Pentium 4) and put pretty much anything (*nix) on it. I know PulseAudio is pretty easy to get running on *buntu, so I might end up doing that. I just want to be able to turn on the laptop and connect the stereo (in any order) and without doing anything else, have it ready to go on the network. Of course, I'm willing to put in some work to get it running. I prefer Slackware and FreeBSD, but the machine will literally just be there to send sound to the stereo.
Someone on forums.freebsd.org suggested NAS as a solution to a similar problem; however, I can't find anything useful regarding how to configure it, troubleshoot it, etc. I've only found random threads on the web by people who know how to use it or by people who can't find any resources for it.
Anyway, I'll be busy setting up PulseAudio to see how that works out. I can always wipe the laptop later, and I have a Kubuntu boot on my main laptop that I don't really care about.
has anybody tried out imo.im? This is a web based instant messaging service, it lets users chat on AIM, Google Talk, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo. My problem is, that I can not chat video and audio with it under slackware. I have video camera, it works for example in Skype (with the propriatare software of Skype), but with imo.im not.
I'm putting this here because it's so weird nobody will think of it, and I need help. I installed Slackware 13.1 a couple of months back. Today, I decided I wanted to hear something. But the video card's hdmi thing took over as the sound device. lsmod sees more snd modules than you've had hot dinners (all ac97 stuff & hda_intel stuff)ls /dev/dsp* just showed /dev/dsp1The sound is some crappy little ac97 thing (CMI9761A) and the video is an ATI/AMD hd4650. I got the ac97 'back' by removing agpgart from the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules script :-o, Now I have /dev/dsp (only) and sound works
I want to make the audio available only on my headset and to turn the laptop speakers off. In windows, when i plug in the headphones, the speakers automatically turn off and audio is output only on the heads but that's not the case with slackware. I was looking in alsamixer and the audio and video configuration, but no success.
Which ways do you use and on what settings do you rip audio cd's to preserve the best fidelity?I installed rubyripper but the multitude of options and formats is a bit baffling for a noob. Basically I want a rip thats closest to the actual CD and not a wav file.
don't let the subjective title distract you. But I am finding kde 4 a bit of chore. I cannot find a way to play audio CD from cd icon. When I insert a CD the only option I get is to extract the cd but not play it.
Every KDE4 application seems to take over the sound card. If I'm playing a song in Amarok and launch Dragon Player, the song stops. If I'm playing a song in an xterm using "mplayer -ao alsa" and then launch Dragon Player, the song stops. Most annoying of all, if I'm playing music in _anything_ and then a notification sounds in Kopete, the music stops.However, if I launch two xterms and play two different MP3s by running "mplayer -ao alsa" in each one, both songs play. So software mixing is working with my sound card.
This made me wonder if KDE is outputting music through OSS instead of ALSA. Well, KDE's audio backend is set to xine, and xine is outputting through ALSA. Under System Settings->Multimedia->Audio Ouput, the only devices I see.
I'd like to use one of my machines for all kinds of audio applications, including home recording (MIDI and analog). Now I am looking for a suitable audio/recording interface. I've searched the web, but didn't find a lot of current information. Most of what I found is outdated.
RME Hammerfall seems to be brilliant, but exceeds my budget. MAudio 2496 seems to be excellent in quality, but a bit limited in connectivity. ESI Juli@ appears to be even better, but the parts exposed to the outside of the computer case don't seem to be overly robust..And that seem already to be all PCI devices supported by ALSA for my purpose! (MAudio Audiophile 192, e. g., is reported not to work that well).
Now I thought, I could avoid all this hassle by choosing a USB device. However, situation seems to be even worse. Terratec DMX 6Fire USB is not supported, at all, MAudio Fast Track Pro is limited to USB 1.1 and 48kHz (I want 96 kHz, at least!) only and requires a patch for 24 Bits. And so on...
I cannot get Rhythymbox to recognize my external cd drive when I put a cd in. It used to do so & I was able to import my cd's this way. Now it simply does not find the cd at all. I have upgraded to F13 from F12, so could this be a reason?
Why are things so difficult using Linux/Ubuntu? I'm trying to rip some tracks from a CD, I've looked at various threads telling me how this might be possible. I've tried RipperX, installed it, used it, and the resultant track I was told couldn't be played because I didn't have the necessary files installed. Funny because I have quite a number of MP3's which play quite happily I tried RubyRipper, couldn't for the life in me work out how to install, never mind use it. I then switched to Windows, Googled CDex, downloaded it, installed it and ripped the three tracks in less time than it's taken me to type this. Don't get me on the subject of cropping photos in Gimp or F-Spot.
I thought it was a driver issue, but after messing around with the ALSA mixer a lot, it turned out that when I enabled headphones(or disabled, honestly not sure) that my headphones worked, and when I took them out the speakers worked. Then when I rebooted for whatever reason, only the speakers(built-in) worked. Really, I'm not sure why this is.
When I got them to work there was a switch for the headphones in the graphical mixer(which is what I used, not the ncurses[?] ALSA thing), but I can't seem to find that anymore. It's not a major issue, it just puts me off watching videos and listening to music because my laptop speakers are really low quality. I'd go out to buy a pair of external speakers, but obviously with the audio jack not working, this could be problematic.
I guess I could buy USB external speakers but then the probability of Slackware having pre-installed audio drivers for a cheap generic brand of speakers is so low it doesn't justify the effort of going and buying some, nor the money that would be spent. Willing to enter any commands/w.e. I'll be on Slackware all the time 'cause I need a Linux system right now.
I've searched about various recommended build orders for audio and video components. Below is what I'm currently using. My original intention for the list was to provide good audio and video support via MPlayer, but recently I've also been playing around with adding voice and video support to Pidgin.
