Compact Disks

I love the scene in the Adam Sandler movie The Wedding Singer where the Yuppie junk bond trader Glenn Gulia, brings one of the first CD players home to his fiancée; Julia, played by Drew Barrymore. Gulia exclaims: "It's a CD player- it cost 800 bucks, but the sound quality is excellent!" I remember those days in 1980's when I heard my first CD and was amazed - no scratches- no hiss. The CD, as promised, ousted the LP record forever. Not soon after the release of CDs and CD players, records disappeared from all but collector's shops. Luckily, CD players didn't stay around 800 US dollars for long.

Soon software companies realized the potential for data storage in these little plastic disks and the CD-ROM market was born. From about 1992 on the use of CDs in computers increased exponentially. Now, almost 10 years later, we're not only talking about reading CDs but writing to them with CD-RW drives that cost under 200 US dollars. A spin-off of the CD, the DVD (Digital Video Disk) is becoming more and more popular everyday. Soon we will have affordable drives for home use that write to these disks as well.

Linux has never been behind in supporting these types of media, so we'll show you some of the utilities out there for playing and ripping tracks from CDs.

Playing CDs

As I pointed out earlier in the lesson on sound, I like to use command line programs to play CDs. My favorite one and I think the one that's easiest to manage is tcd by Tim Gerla

You can control which tracks to play, adjust the volume, eject the CD and do other things all from the keyboard. You can use 'tcd' to keep a database of your CDs for easy playing. Under X-window, you can fire up this baby in an x-term and enjoy hours of listening pleasure.

GUI based CD players are plentiful as well, and when you've installed and configured your X-window system, you can try out those as well.

Ripping CD tracks

The whole Napster phenomenon, as I pointed out at the beginning of this article, made the practice of converting songs on CDs "ripping as it is also called" very popular. Here we're going to talk about one of the most widely used programs in the Linux world. The official position of this author is that ripping tracks from one's own CDs for personal use is OK by me (and the law, it would seem). For example, ripping your favorite songs and converting them to Ogg format to make it comfortable to play your favorite songs from your desktop doesn't entail you venturing into legal gray zones. If you shared them however, that's a different story. So, if you're interested in ripping tracks from CDs, the Linux program par excelence for doing that is cdparanoia .

cdparanoia is billed as a ripping tool for CD-drives that could be problematic. It seems to work fairly well on the variety of speed drives that I have tried except for a couple of ancient ones. It's available for download from the same people who bring you Ogg Vorbis. Here's how it works:

Let's say you wanted to rip track (song) 6 from a CD. You would place the CD in the drive (I have forgotten that on occasion - duh) and type:

cdparanoia -- "6"

The output would look something like this:

   
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty  and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/


Ripping from sector   48423 (track  6 [0:00.00])
          to sector   58677 (track  6 [2:16.54])

outputting to cdda.wav

 (== PROGRESS == [     >  | 050085 00 ] == :-) . ==)

So now you have track 6, called 'cdda.wav' (cdda stands for Compact Disk Digital Audio, by the way) ready to be converted into your favorite compressed format, like Ogg. Here's a refresher. To convert your ripped track to Ogg, type this: (change it to your info)

oggenc -b 192 -a "The_Rubber_Band" -l "Gummed Up" -t "shes_elastic" cdda.wav -n "%a_%t.ogg"

Now you have a nice Ogg file that you can play with ogg123

Other options for ripping tracks with cdparanoia include:

cdparanoia -B

This will rip the whole CD into separate tracks, named track01.cdda.wav, track02.cdda.wav, track03.cdda.wav etc.

cdparanoia cdparanoia -B -- "-5"

This will rip tracks up to and including track 5 into separate *.wav files. If you want one big file, just eliminate the -B option. Do not forget to type the double hyphens -- before track numbers. Just to finish off, here's an interesting combination:

cdparanoia -- "4[:45]-4[2:15]"

The above example will rip track 4 starting at 45 seconds and end at 2 minutes 15 seconds into the same track. Why would you want to do this? A number of reasons - you only like the awesome lead guitar part of a song? That could be. Anyway, the manual page (type: man cdparanoia) is a particularly well-explained one, so if you want more examples, there's a good source of information there.

Well, that concludes our lesson on sound. You should be able to listen to, create and manipulate sound with Linux.

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