Handling Audio CDs

There are many ways to listen to your favorite music tracks. Either play a CD or play digitized versions of them. The following section features CD player applications as well as some applications that can be used for digitizing audio CDs.

For information about how to create your own CDs, refer to Chapter 22, Burning CDs and DVDs With K3b.

[Important]CDDA and Analog CD Playback

There are two different ways of playing audio CDs. CD and DVD drives capable of analog CD playback read the audio data and send it to the sound output device. Some external drives connected via PCMCIA, FireWire, or USB need to use CDDA (Compact Disk Digital Audio) to extract the audio data first then play it as digital PCM. The players featured in the following sections do not support CDDA. Use XMMS if you need CDDA support.

KsCD—Audio CD Player

KsCD is an easy-to-use audio CD player included in the skscd package. If it is installed, press Alt+F2 and enter kscd to start the application.

Figure 19.4. KsCD User Interface

KsCD User Interface

Compressing Audio Data: Ripping

Audio compression can be handled by various tools. The following sections feature a command line approach to encoding and playing audio data as well as some graphical applications capable of audio compression.

Compressing Audio CDs with Konqueror

Konqueror is not only a browser and a file manager, it also allows you to rip audio CDs. Before you start the actual ripping process with Konqueror, configure the handling of audio CDs and the Ogg Vorbis encoder in the Personal Settings. From the main menu select Configure Desktop, then click Advanced+Audio CDs. The configuration module is divided into three tabs: General, Names, and Ogg Vorbis Encoder. Normally, a suitable CD device is detected automatically. Do not change this default setting unless the autodetection fails and you need to set the CD device manually. Error correction and encoder priority can also be set here. The Ogg Vorbis Encoder tab determines the quality of the encoding. To configure online lookup of album, track, and artist information for your ripped audio data, select Add Track Information.

To start Konqueror, press Alt+F2 and enter konqueror. Insert the CD into the CD-ROM drive and enter audiocd:/ in the Location bar. Konqueror then lists the tracks of the CD, and some folders.

To keep uncompressed audio data on your disk, just select the .wav files and drag them into another Konqueror window to copy them to their final destination. To start the Ogg Vorbis encoding, drag the Ogg Vorbis folder or files from this folder to another Konqueror window. The encoding starts as soon as you drop the Ogg Vorbis folder at its destination.

Figure 19.5. Ripping Audio CDs with Konqueror

Ripping Audio CDs with Konqueror

Command Line Tools for Encoding and Playback of Audio Data

Ogg Vorbis (package vorbis-tools) is a free audio compression format that is now supported by the majority of audio players and even portable MP3 players. The Web page of the project is http://www.xiph.org/vorbis.

Your system comes with several tools supporting Ogg Vorbis. oggenc is a command line tool used for encoding WAV files to Ogg. Just run oggenc  myfile.wav to transform a given .wav file into Ogg Vorbis. The -h option displays an overview of the other parameters. Oggenc supports encoding with a variable bit rate. In this way, an even higher degree of compression can be achieved. Instead of the bit rate, specify the desired quality with the parameter -q. -b determines the average bit rate. -m and -M specify the minimum and maximum bit rate.

ogg123 is a command line Ogg player. Start it with a command like ogg123 mysong.ogg.