Playing Music and Listening to the Radio

After your sound card is working, perhaps the only thing you want to do, audiowise, is to play your CDs and MP3s, and access your favorite Internet radio stations. SUSE Linux provides a wealth of ways to do this and more.

The most mature all-purpose media player for Linux (and all X Window Systems) is the X Multimedia System (XMMS). XMMS modeled its GUI after Winamp, the popular media player for Windows.

Its display is very modular, so you can have as much (or as little) eye candy to visually enhance your audio experience. Figure 10.1 shows what happens if you display everything in a default installation.

Figure 10.1. Arrange the XMMS display any way you like to enhance your audio experience. Equalizers, playlists, sound analyzers, and oscilloscope meters are all showing here in addition to the simple player in the upper left.

XMMS plays most every audio format, with the exception of Windows Media (.wma, .asf) files. It will play your audio CDs out of the box, as well as MPEG movies.

If you have a live Internet connection, both XMMS and the KDE CD player (KSCD) will contact the CD Database (CDDB) of your choice (XMMS defaults to FreeDB) to deliver track information when you play a CD.

Sound Formats

Digital sound recordings appear in several formats. You can create and listen to files in the following formats with SUSE Linux:

• Raw More properly known as the headerless format, audio files using this format contain an amorphous variety of specific settings and encodings. All other sound files have a short section of code (the header) that identifies the format type.

• MP3 Perhaps the most popular audio format ever. MP3 uses a commercial, proprietary compression scheme, which can create licensing issues for both creators and users.

• WAV These days, WAV (Windows Audio Visual format) files are mostly used as brief sound effects to accompany error messages and other computer events. This is because WAV files are not compressed and so take up a lot of room even for a short clip.

• Ogg-Vorbis This format is the open source competitor to MP3. You'll enjoy better compression, better audio playback, and you can't be sued for using it.

Tip

Want to learn more about these and other audio formats? Head over to the Audio Format FAQ at http://www.cnpbagwell.com/audio.html.

Should you need to convert an audio file from one format to another, various utilities can help you do that. The best known is Sound Exchange (SoX). This command-line utility is not installed by default, but you can get it via YaST.

Timidity is a cross-platform MIDI-to-WAV converter and player. It handles karaoke files, too, displaying the words so you can sing while it plays.

Internet Radio and Other Streaming Media

One of the best things about your Internet connection, even under dial-up, is the capability to hear hundreds of radio stations broadcasting music, news, and information globally through the World Wide Web. What was once the province of hobbyists with expensive radio equipment is now available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Streaming audio comes in four formats: RealAudio, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and Windows Media (wma). SUSE Linux media players handle all these formats except for Windows Media.

XMMS does streaming audio quite well, though occasionally it will ask you for a file to play.

The Linux player made for streaming audio is the Helix Community Player. RealNetworks open-sourced the code for its various media formats and the RealPlayer client some time ago.

SUSE Linux 9.2 was the first SUSE version to come equipped by default with RealPlayer Gold, although earlier UNIX versions of the RealAudio player worked with Linux. RealPlayer (owned by RealNetworks) and its completely open-source cousin, the Helix Community Player, play most audio types, streaming or not. SUSE Linux 10 includes RealPlayer 10.0.5 in both the open-source and retail versions.

If you happen to be fond of the built-in browser included in the Windows version of RealPlayer, you may be disappointed with the Linux version, but even though it may lack visual appeal, it performs its actual function playing audio quite well.

Note

If you're running SUSE Linux 9.2 on a 64-bit processor, you may have trouble running RealPlayer inside Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox, Epiphany, and Galeon). The 32-bit RealPlayer package included with the distribution does not install the Mozilla plug-in, and attempting to install it manually results in the browser crashing on launch. The Helix community is working on a 64-bit version of both the Helix and RealPlayer applications, including the plug-ins, which may be released by the time you read this.

RealPlayer works fine as a standalone player under an AMD Athlon 3000+.

Both versions of the Helix player have the plug-in architecture that should, in time, yield a player that does what every user wants it to. This depends on whether enough users make their wishes known.