CD-ROM Music

From: Gerard Oberle (goberle_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/19/03 

Date: 19 Dec 2003 07:53:32 -0800

I recently built a new machine and installed RedHat 9 and WinXP. How
can I play "digital" audio and/or movies under Linux?

I don't have an audio cable from the CD-ROM (or the DVD, for that
matter) to the analog inputs on the "sound card" (actually, part of
the motherboard), as I had on my (very) old machine. Nevertheless,
the WinXP media player seems to be able to play both music (from CDs)
and movies (on the DVD drive), apparently by actually reading the data
and feeding it digitally to the sound "device(s)."

When I try to play an audio CD from RedHat, it appears to direct the
CD drive to "play" an audio stream, because I can plug headphones into
the drive and hear the music. Lacking an audio cable, though, I
cannot play music through the speakers.

1. Is there software for Linux that will do what WinXP does, to
actually read the data and digitally feed it to the soundcard? If so,
what is it? Might it be on my RedHat distro?

2. Similarly, is there software that will play a movie? I have heard
that the movie industry frowns upon this, and has sued someone for the
audacity to try to play movies he's paid for on hardware he owns,
because he paid no tithe (I think the mob calls it "protection
money.") I'd be curious to know what the story is with that, but it's
really not germane to the issue.

3. No, I don't know what program I used to try to play CDs on RedHat.
It's so windows-like --- there's a menu option to play an audio CD
that merely hangs when invoked from the menu. But I can get it to run
by inserting an audio CD, and it works (as described above). I've
posted a separate note to try to find out how to tell what the menu
choices do (and how to change them). In this respect, it feels like
Windoze rather than Unix so far.

4. Should I install an audio cable anyway?

5. Are there any plain "sound" files on the RedHat distro (analogous
to Windows' *.wav), from which I can otherwise test the install? Can
someone give me a pattern I can use with, say, find / -name "?????" to
find them?

On my really old box I used workbone from a console terminal. It was
sort of like using, well, Unix.

Thanks in advance for any insight. Sorry if this was rambling.

Cheers!
- Jerry Oberle
perl -e 'printf "%silto%c%sberle%cearthlink%cnet%c", "ma", 58, "go",
64, 46, 10;'

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