a simple task...play a CD...no research project?

[clariceoshea]

I tried every program avarok, kscd, etc and could NOT get a music CD to play.

I tried everything...different drives, insering CD and selecting from popup menu, etc

I was able to rip selections off the CD and play as ogg files.

I remember NOT being able to play a CD since about Fedora 9

I noticed that the options were designed by one or more of a group of people

deep into the audio business.

Designers: keep neophytes in mind when choosing words!

Wonder if there is a way of ripping into mp3 files rather than ogg.

I used K3b and for ogg it worked great

[glennzo]

I tried every program avarok, kscd, etc and could NOT get a music CD to play.

The obvious first question is did you install codecs, etc? Fedora Setup Guides

[Doug G]

vlc works well with music.

[Fenrin]

of course there is a way to rip to mp3. Just install the rpmfusion repo. There are all mainstream multimedia codecs included. YOu probably have to install lame and gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-ugly.

oh and ogg is really a great audio container. The sound quality of ogg audio is considerable better than mp3. Especially at lower bitrates (<128 kbit/s). And it's even patent free and included by default no reason for the facepalm or disgusted face.

[george_toolan]

yum install lame

What exactly happens when you try to play an audio cd?

Rhythmbox should be able to play audio cds out of the box and contrary to popular belief you don't need any codecs to play them ;-)

[Doug G]

I use grip to rip audio cd to mp3

[Gareth Jones]

Yes, normal CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio standard) CDs are raw sample data (plus error correction data handled by the hardware), so don't need codecs. More advanced (but very uncommon) formats might though.

In the olden days, the optical drive would be wired directly to the sound card, and CD playback was essentially a hardware operation – software players just told it when to play and stop etc. These days it seems that the preferred playback method is effectively a real-time rip, which may be more problematic.

Here, Rythmbox segfaults if I try to play a CD, but Sound Juicer works. I haven't got KDE installed to test its tools.

Sound Juicer can make MP3 files if you prefer, but you'll need to install gstreamer-plugins-bad/-ugly from RPMFusion to get the codecs as Fenrin said (MP3 is patented). Ogg Vorbis is a better option if your player supports it though (better sound quality per bit-rate).

[clariceoshea]

when I play (or try to play) a music CD using rhythmbox or any others

absolutely NOTHING HAPPENS

I played around with options to no avail

with dual boot (XP Prof) I can, of course, push in a CD and it plays
instantly with no research project

[Gareth Jones]

If you run the CD player from a terminal, do you get any error messages?

[RupertPupkin]

In Audacious you just go to the Services menu and select "Play CD". No research project required.

[clariceoshea]

installed Audacious with yumex

and as you said, CD was played...THANKS!

[sonoran]

Originally Posted by Doug G

I use grip to rip audio cd to mp3

A word of warning about grip:

I've used it successfully for years but ran into a problem recently after ripping an audio cd in my Sony dvd burner. The rip was fine, but several hours later when I tried to copy a dvd to hd the job required 17 minutes. After seeing the same thing with several other dvds, I reset the speed of cd and dvd functions to their max with k3b, which restored the dvd-copy time to 2-3 minutes.

A little research revealed that the last release of grip was in 2005. It could just be a bad match for my Sony Optiarc drive, but my suspicion is that grip might not work optimally with modern hardware. As an experiment I re-ripped the same audio cd using k3b, which produced a good rip in 1/10th the time and did not require any fiddling afterwards.

[Doug G]

Nah, it was probably your Sony drive. I've used lots of different hardware and I've had the worst luck with Sony optical disk drives comparred to all the others (samsung, lite-on, lg, etc).

Anyway, thanks for the heads up on grip, I don't know how current the software is, all I can say is I've had zero problems with grip ripping some 500+ audio CD's.

[Gareth Jones]

I thought GRIP was discontinued in favour of Sound Juicer? Wikipedia lists GRIP as "unmaintained".

[sonoran]

We have serious dust, heat and dog hair issues here on the desert and Sonys seem to survive longer than other brands. They advertise a "Dust protected enclosure" and my experience bears that out.

The Fedora maintainer of grip is doing his best, but it does appear to be a losing battle. He's thinking of dropping the playback functions:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753979

Thanks for the report. I think this will not be fixed. I am thinking about disabling the playback functionality of grip. grip is not maintained upstream since a long time. It still works pretty good as a ripper and the CD playing functionality is not really necessary with all the other CD players available.

My warning was just intended as a heads-up that grip does something to the speed settings of the hardware and does not restore when it's finished. If it can mess that up, what other harm is it capable of? It is also very slow compared to k3b.