Playing CDs in Amarok

[royleith]

I know, I know, not that old chestnut! Over the years since Amarok became the default player, I have installed Kubuntu for myself and for other folk, on desktops and laptops. I have never managed to get Amarok to play from an audio CD. I see from the archives that I am not alone.

I think it is time to pose the question again with Kubuntu 11.10.

Amarok, Version 2.4.3
Using KDE 4.7.2 (4.7.2)

From a previous thread, I typed the following into konsole,

amarok -d --nofork

Amarok started and (I think because of all the other players I had open) it listed the contents of the audio CD in the drive,

Selecting all the tracks and choosing 'Add to Playlist' did not add the tracks to the playlist. The debug output gave this:

amarok: Drop from external source or file browser
amarok: BEGIN: void Playlist::Controller::slotFinishDirectoryLoader(co nst TrackList&)
amarok: END__: void Playlist::Controller::slotFinishDirectoryLoader(co nst TrackList&) [Took: 0s]
amarok: BEGIN: void ScanManager::checkForDirectoryChanges()
amarok: BEGIN: void DirWatchJob::setPaused(bool)
amarok: END__: void DirWatchJob::setPaused(bool) [Took: 0s]
amarok: END__: void ScanManager::checkForDirectoryChanges() [Took: 0s]

Nothing appears in the playlist. Doing the same with any audio files adds the files to the playlist.

I had already reinstalled Amarok, just in case.

The same thing happens when the CD is inserted and Plasma asks me whether I want to play it in Amarok. It may, or may not list the files on the Media Sources panel, but will not add the tracks to the playlist.

As an alternative, I installed Rhythmbox and VLC. Nothing I could do with Rhythmbox would get it to list or play the tracks. VLC was the same, at first. I noticed that it was looking for /dev/cdrom0. Dolphin told me that the device was /dev/sr0. VLC would not select the correct device no matter what I tried. Eventually, I typed in the correct driver and off it went.

VLC stuttered at irregular intervals. I remembered one archive posting mentioning a changing wallpaper doing this at regular intervals. Watching the System Monitor, I noticed that Dolphin and another process did an irregular 'disk sleep mode' function that appeared to coincide with the stutters. The moral of this part of the tale is to close file managers and anything doing a file management function whilst playing back CDs. This particular system is an Acer Revo 3700 with a dual core Atom. I don't think that the low power of the cpu is the cause of the stuttering.

Has anyone managed to get Amarok to play an audio CD without first ripping the tracks?

Regards
Roy Leith

[royleith]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

Just an additional note, I looked, again, at the handbook. It shows an audio CD icon under Local Music. On my system, only the Local Collection hard drive icon is shown together with some files I had previously ripped from the test CD.

The optical drive is an external, high speed DVD player/recorder connected via USB. Previously, I had no more luck with an IDE connected drive and a SATA connected drive.

Regards
Roy Leith

[OneLine]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

I don't know about the Amarok but here the Bangarang is telling:

Advanced probing on /dev/sr0 failed while reading block size

A bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=284662
A fix committed on 20/11/2011

Maybe with the KDE 4.7.4...

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

I know this will not help your endeavor, but as soon as I get a CD I rip it into mp3 files.

No fuss, no mess, no hair pulling... Just good, crisp music.

I fear that CDs are soon going to head the way of the LP with portable music players and online downloads of music readily available and more popular now.

Personally, I have not actually used a CD in years - with the exception of ripping them to mp3s :-D.

Joe

[dibl]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

I know this will not help your endeavor, but as soon as I get a CD I rip it into mp3 files.

No fuss, no mess, no hair pulling... Just good, crisp music.

I fear that CDs are soon going to head the way of the LP with portable music players and online downloads of music readily available and more popular now.

Personally, I have not actually used a CD in years - with the exception of ripping them to mp3s :-D.

Joe

Yep, I pretty much agree.

EXCEPT, with the cost of storage down at 15 cents per GB, I rip to .wav format. No need to use compression, and lose anything in the quality domain.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

however, Microshaft 7, now considers MP3 to be an "unknown" file system that may cause damage to your computer!!!

woodsmoke

[royleith]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

@All,

I have found audacious to work just fine. It is best to stick with the default interface and keep well clear of the Winamp skins. I will wait and see if amarok ever gets sorted out. It is prettier than audacious!

Regards
Roy Leith

[SteveRiley]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

however, Microshaft 7, now considers MP3 to be an "unknown" file system that may cause damage to your computer!!!

Eh?

[LinuxRocks]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

however, Microshaft 7, now considers MP3 to be an "unknown" file system that may cause damage to your computer!!!

woodsmoke

Means nothing to me :-D

Let the sheeple use their broken OS

Joe

[woodsmoke]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

Steve:

The college "upgraded" all of the computers to Windows 7 over the summer.

That resulted in two things that are overt attempts to "cower" people into not using Microsoft's OWN previous file system.

a) The Obama DOJ is doing nothing about this I note. A ppt made in MY.... Powerpoint 2000 software and taken to the college will play correctly. However, if I alter ANYthing in the ppt and..... AT THE COLLEGE MACHINE.... save as ppt and not as pptx, MS declares that the ppt is corrupted and that it has been forced to replace some slides with blank slides.

This is a BLATANT lie. I can take the supposedly corrupted ppt to ANOTHER computer at the college and it will play fine. I can bring it home and run it on my Vista machine and it plays fine. I can play it on a Linux machine.

I can take a cd with the original ppt on it to the machine, it will, at first, say that the ppt is corrupted and will display a "black page" inside the folder and then plays the ppt normally because it cannot write information to the ppt on the cd.

The file has had data added to it that somehow places a white image on top of the slides, but it only displays the white image on the machine where the ppt was altered.

If this out and out lie had occurred "back when" the DOJ would have been all over it... curious that it is being ignored.

b) as to the MP3.

If I try to play an MP3 on a school 2007 system it pops a window and says that the MP3 is an "UNKNOWN" file format and will possibly cause damage to the computer. It offers a redirect to "solve the problem". The redirect is to Microsoft support and to a page that just repeats that the MP3 is an UNKNOWN file system and it does not have any way to play the file.

To get around that the college also has Quickplayer on the machines and Quickplayer will play the file.

To play a "stream" such as from SOMA fm, again, WinMediaPlayer says that an mp3 stream is an unknown file system but it will play the .wav stream.

One could justify the MS behaviour about the MP3 because MS want's people to use their proprietary format: WAV but to intentionally corrupt their previous file systems would not seem to me, on the face of it, justifiable in any sense of the word.

If there truly was something "corrupted" in the .ppt file then I could see how they might not find it "convenient" to go to great lengths to develop a fix.

There are even MULTITUDES of sites on the net that feed on this, the fixing of the supposedly corrupted file system and all the app does is remove the data that MS put on the ppt and then saves the file as a pptx. It doesn't "fix" anything, it just removed added data and resaves as .pptx.

And nothing is being said by anybody in the government which a decade or so ago wanted to dismantle MS.

As an aside this changing of the file started several years ago with .docx. I figured out how to extract the original .doc data from the supposedly corrupted .docx file that was made when OO saved as .docx.

All of this gefelterfarb was purported by MS to be a big enhancement to "carry the document into the next century and be forwardly compatible".

Kind of like OOXML. >

woodsmoke

[dibl]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

The .mp3 thing sounds strange, Woody -- I've been running Win 7 in a VM for over a year, and I just double-checked to see how it handles .mp3 files. Here's a screenshot -- and it was not necessary for me to adjust any settings for this, it is default:

[img width=400 height=289]http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/6599/win7mp3.png[/img]

On their .docx and .xlsx formats -- yah, that's all quite annoying. But you can always make the new Office products "save as" and go back to the older formats, for portability.


BTW, back to the topic, I don't normally play my CDs -- I ripped them all years ago. Yesterday for fun I tried one on my aptosid/KDE 4.7 system, and amarok crashed.

[de_koraco]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

Ah, the beauty of Microsoft Ricky Gervais files. A couple of months ago, I got a .ppt presentation for translating. The people who sent it have Office 2010. but they saved it as .ppt, no x at the end. I fire up LO Impress, but a bunch of tables would get garbled up. Ok, let's do this in MS Office 2010. I go to my mother's, open the file, do my thing, try to save as .ppt, it says the file is corrupted and can't be saved (that's after grinding down the whole computer for three minutes). So I try to save it as .pptx, no can't do. I open it in Powerpoint 2003 on a second computer (and thank God I had that one), it saves it as .ppt without problems, but Ricky Gervais 2010 refuses to open it, saying it's corrupted. So I do the whole translation on the second machine, send it to my employers who obviously have Office 2010, and by the time they edit a few things and send it to me, it's .pptx, lol. Thank God I had the second computer on standby.

I had similar issues with Excel files. These days, I only accept .doc files, I send everything else back. I always chuckle when people complain how LO can't get the formatting of Microshaft's binary formats from hell straight, when identical versions of MSOffice can't open each other's documents.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

One could justify the MS behaviour about the MP3 because MS want's people to use their proprietary format: WAV

WAV, while designed by Microsoft and IBM, is certainly not some secret attempt to take over your music. It's a fully documented audio file format (links in the Wikipedia article you referenced) that can contain audio encoded in a number of methods. WAV is supported just about everywhere; take a look in your computer's /usr/share/sounds/alsa for a few examples And consider that WAV is free for anyone to implement, yet MP3 is plagued with ongoing licensing problems. (WMA is far more troublesome than WAV.)

A ppt made in MY.... Powerpoint 2000 software and taken to the college will play correctly. However, if I alter ANYthing in the ppt and..... AT THE COLLEGE MACHINE.... save as ppt and not as pptx, MS declares that the ppt is corrupted and that it has been forced to replace some slides with blank slides....

This is truly curious. I'd be interested in examining this file. If you don't mind sharing, PM me and I'll let you know where to send it.

[royleith]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

I noticed an Amarok update, so I decided to have another go. Choosing to open a track in Amerok from Dolphin now works! It takes forever to load a single track, but plays well once that task of a couple of minutes is complete. It will do the same from the Ogg Vorbis presentation in Dolphin with an equally large loading time. I did not try with mp3, but have no reason to think that would not work.

Even more interesting, a CDdbase update occurred and the correct CD cover and title was displayed. That only happened once. I haven't been able to get it to happen again even after a reboot. The database must be being accessed in order to list the CD and track details in the media sources section.

Although a music CD icon appears in 'Places' and the tracks are listed, they cannot be played or added to the playlist from within Amerok.

Still, playing a CD track 'direct' of the CD in Amerok is a first for me. It is a sign of progress.


***Breaking news***

I just found the Audio CD icon in 'Local Music' and managed to copy single tracks and the whole album to the Playlist. However, Amerok reports 'Too many errors in playlist' and does not play anything. I think it may be because of the large delay in loading data, but there is no sign of the CD drive even being accessed to read the data.

Regards
Roy Leith

[Snowhog]

Re: Playing CDs in Amarok

WHY, WHy, Why, or why don't/won't the Amarok developers make Amarok work with music CD's!? Are they really telling all of us to just "go pound sand -- music CD's are 'old technology'; use them as coffee coasters and stop complaining"

I stopped using Amarok quite some time ago. I have a fair collection of music CD's, and there are times I'd like to listen to them on my laptop. But....