Ubuntu Linux® For Dummies®

Chapter 20. Lyrical Ubuntu: Using Multimedia Applications

In This Chapter

• Playing music CDs

• Playing MP3s and Internet radio with XMM

• Using Rhythmbox

• Ripping music from CDs

• Burning music to CDs

It used to be that computers were all about work. Then came graphical interfaces, and computers very quickly became multimedia machines. There's not much that you can't do with computers when it comes to multimedia.

Ubuntu is able to do all the fun things that you expect from today's computers. This chapter shows you how to have fun with Ubuntu. I talk about using audio CDs, playing Internet audio streams (continuous music or voice transmitted over the Internet), and more.

The first three sections in this chapter describe how to play audio CDs, play audio files using various formats, and listen to Internet radio. The last sections describe how to rip and burn music CDs.

Playing CDs

Ubuntu plays CDs if you want. Here's all you have to do:

1. Pop an audio disc in your Ubuntu computer's CD player.

   The Sound Juicer window opens, showing all the tracks on the CD.

   By default, all the tracks are selected to play. You can deselect any tracks that you don't want to play: Click the check box next to the track.

2. Click the Play button to start playing the selected CD tracks.

That's all there is to playing a CD. Simple.

Playing MP3s with XMMS

MP3 is a popular audio‐encoding protocol. Ubuntu provides an MP3 player called XMMS (X Multimedia System), which you can use to play MP3 files on your computer.

XMMS can play the following ...