Test Driving Linux

Chapter 4. Music and Videos

The personal computer is fast becoming the hub of our digital lifestyle. With the emergence of high-speed Internet access, MP3 music files, streaming video, and P2P file sharing, the home computer is often more of an entertainment device than a place to balance your checkbook or write a school report.

A computer running Linux can be a great multimedia machine for your home. It is capable of playing DVDs and most forms of video files, listening to every conceivable type of music format, and creating and editing video and audio content. Many of the people who write programs for Linux are multimedia nuts themselves, so you can rest assured that the capabilities of multimedia software on Linux are second to none.

This chapter covers the common multimedia tasks you'll want to accomplish on your computer. However, because you're running Linux from the Move CD, you won't be able to try out some of the things I describe in this chapter unless you have more than one CD or DVD drive in your computer. (Obviously, if you have only a single CD drive, you can't listen to or burn a CD because the Move CD is already in the drive.) So instead of trying to work around these limitations, I'll just describe the programs and not worry about whether you can actually test out the features (though of course I'll let you know if there is an easy way to do so).

Booting advice for Move

If you do have two optical drives, boot your machine with Move in a non-burning drive, i.e., a CD or DVD reader. This leaves the burner device free to make a CD.

Playing Music Files

Besides playing games (which I'll get to in the next chapter), the most common entertainment purpose computers are put to is playing music. Linux has dozens of programs for playing MP3 files and nearly every other digital music format.

Digital Audio Files

A CD, even a music CD, is nothing more than a storage device similar to a hard drive or a floppy disk, designed to hold a certain amount of data. The recording industry standards call for music CDs to hold 650 MB of data. (Recordable CDs for computers can now hold up to 700 MB.) Each song on a music CD takes up a certain amount of space depending upon how long it is—35 MB is pretty typical. So, a 12-song album takes up around 420 MB on the CD, whereas an album with 20 songs usually needs to be put on two CDs because it uses more than 650 MB of space. To make a digital music file you must use a software program to extract the song from the CD, a process commonly referred to as ripping . This usually produces a WAV file that is about 35 MB in size and is an exact copy of the music on your CD.

Since having a bunch of songs in the WAV format can take up a lot of space on your hard drive, people usually compress the files down to something more manageable, such as a 3.5 MB MP3 file. This process is known as encoding . Basically, an MP3 encoding tool uses a special algorithm to determine the optimal way to make the file smaller without losing too much of the original qualities of the music. It does this by removing sounds that are out of the range of human hearing, dropping sounds that are masked by louder sounds, and so on. The result is a digital music file that is of lesser quality than the original, but it's much, much smaller and is still good enough for most people's musical tastes. The loss of quality during encoding is why MP3s are known as a lossy file format.

There are several problems with MP3 files. First of all, their compression algorithms are no longer the best available—other lossy file formats can produce better quality audio at even smaller file sizes. Also, the MP3 compression algorithm must be licensed if you want to create a legal encoding program that uses the MP3 format. To remedy these problems, the open source community has created its own audio format known as Ogg Vorbis. This format offers superior sound and compression to the MP3, and since it is open source there are no licensing issues surrounding its compression algorithm. You can test the sound difference yourself by visiting http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html.

The application for listening to music CDs in Move is called KsCD. To use it, all you have to do is pop a music CD into the drive, and the KsCD application will load automatically and begin playing your music (Figure 4-1). KsCD is configured to look up the album on the Internet and pull down a list of the album's songs. You have the typical buttons to play, fast forward, rewind, change tracks, pause, and stop. To exit the application, select Extras→ Quit.

Figure 4-1. The CD player application, KsCD

If the KsCD program did not automatically start when you inserted a CD, it is probably because Move is watching the wrong CD drive. When your computer has two CD drives, one is considered the primary and the other the secondary; Move is configured to play CDs from the primary drive. To solve this problem, you can either reboot with Move in the other drive, or tell the KsCD program which drive to read from. To do this, open KsCD manually by clicking K Menu→ Enjoy music and video→ Listen to audio CDs. Inside of KsCD, click Extras→ Configure KsCD. At the bottom of the configuration window that appears, look for the field labeled CD-ROM Device containing the entry /dev/cdrom. Add a 1 to the end of this entry (/dev/cdrom1) to specify your second CD drive, click OK, and you should now be able to play CDs from that drive.

MP3s and other digital music files are played with the Totem multimedia program (Figure 4-2). Simply double-click an MP3's icon in Konqueror, and Totem will load and begin playing your music. Of course, at the moment this is easier said than done—the Move CD doesn't actually have any MP3 files on it. There are a few solutions to this problem. If you have a USB key, you can put a few of your MP3 files on it from within Windows, and then access those files by opening your Home directory in Konqueror. Or, if you have music files stored on your Windows hard drive, you can access them using the method described at the end of Chapter 3.

Figure 4-2. Teh Totem multimedia player

Totem's buttons are similar to those of a CD player and are used to control your digital music files. When you change tracks in Totem, you are actually moving through your playlist , which is simply a list of songs you select from your collection. This can be a random selection of songs you choose on the spur of the moment, or you can create a playlist and save it so you can use it again and again. You can create playlists to play back albums you have ripped and encoded from CD (many ripping programs do this automatically), or playlists for all the music you like to listen to on a rainy day, or at night, or while driving in Kansas. You bring up the playlist window in Totem by clicking the fourth button in the lower left of Totem's main window. From here you can add and remove music files from your playlist, move files within the playlist, or save the playlist so you can use it later.

Totem is not the only music playback application for Linux; there are several other popular ones as well. My favorites are XMMS and amaroK. XMMS, shown in Figure 4-3, looks and acts a lot like the popular Windows program WinAMP. You can use XMMS to listen to CDs and to play back Ogg files, as well as MP3, WMA, FLAC, and several other audio formats. XMMS has been around for years and is a very mature program; it comes with a playlist manager and a graphic equalizer, and there are dozens of plug-ins available that enhance its features in several ways. Visit http://www.xmms.org for more details.

Figure 4-3. The XMMS mulitimedia player

My new favorite music program is amaroK (Figure 4-4). This program provides a lot of features in a cool-looking interface. I like that it can look up my album on the Internet and pull down images of the album cover, that it remembers which songs I've listened to and keeps statistics on my listening habits, and that it can automatically create playlists of the songs I never listen to as well as the songs I listen to most. (It's quite interesting to listen to a collection of songs you haven't heard in a while.) The newest version of amaroK even looks up song lyrics for you! Check out http://amarok.kde.org for more information on this neat program.

Figure 4-4. A typical view in amaroK