Saturday, September 11, 2004
running XMMS instead of KsCD using magicdev
I don't have an analog audio cable attaching both of my CD drives to my sound card. I think I have one connected directly, but I'm not completely sure. When I drop a CD into a drive, it is hit-or-miss whether KsCD and other analog input CD players can output music.
XMMS, on the other hand, can perform digital extraction from uncabled CD drives. That, and it is a nicely unified player that I use for other audio formats anyways.
Mandrake 10.0, unfortunately, is configured to use KsCD by default when a new CD is put into a drive. This is just extra irritation, when all I want to do is listen to some music.
It looks like there are alot of people out there wanting to run XMMS when they load up a CD, but nobody has a good answer. I now have one, no thanks to magicdev's utter lack of documentation.
To get magicdev to load the CD in XMMS you can't just run gnome-cd-properties (which is "the" way to configure magicdev) and change the command to run /usr/bin/xmms when a music CD is inserted. This would be the simplest configuration change.
The reason you can't just edit the settings in gnome-cd-properties (or heaven-forbid, browse for a program using a nice picker) is because there is UI and no documented way to manipulate the parameters magicdev passes to executed programs. magicdev does seem to provide a special expression-passing language. However, in gnome-cd-properties, the only example of this is "%d", which passes the device name (eg, /dev/hdc).
This parameter format works great for programs that expect it, but XMMS just gets a segfault if it is passed a device (/dev/hdc) instead of a directory (/mnt/cdrom) or a file it understands. So we need to translate /dev/hd* into the appropriate mounted directory. /etc/fstab has the necessary information, we just need to parse it and pass it to XMMS.
There are two places this can be done. One is a per-user setting, the other place you can edit will change CD behavior system-wide, and can only be done as root.
If you can only change your own settings, or want to make changes on a per-user basis, run gnome-cd-properties. Set the command for audio CD's to "/usr/bin/xmms `awk '$1=="'%d'" {print $2}' /etc/fstab`" and click Exit.
If you want to make a system-wide change, open a console, su to root, then use your favourite editor to change the "launch kscd" line in /etc/dynamic/user-scripts/audio_cd.script to "launch xmms `awk '$1=="'$DEV'" {print $2}' /etc/fstab`". Save, and exit.
To test your changes, put a CD into the drive. XMMS should open with the CD's tracks in the playlist, and begin playing.
I hope this helps someone.
XMMS, on the other hand, can perform digital extraction from uncabled CD drives. That, and it is a nicely unified player that I use for other audio formats anyways.
Mandrake 10.0, unfortunately, is configured to use KsCD by default when a new CD is put into a drive. This is just extra irritation, when all I want to do is listen to some music.
It looks like there are alot of people out there wanting to run XMMS when they load up a CD, but nobody has a good answer. I now have one, no thanks to magicdev's utter lack of documentation.
To get magicdev to load the CD in XMMS you can't just run gnome-cd-properties (which is "the" way to configure magicdev) and change the command to run /usr/bin/xmms when a music CD is inserted. This would be the simplest configuration change.
The reason you can't just edit the settings in gnome-cd-properties (or heaven-forbid, browse for a program using a nice picker) is because there is UI and no documented way to manipulate the parameters magicdev passes to executed programs. magicdev does seem to provide a special expression-passing language. However, in gnome-cd-properties, the only example of this is "%d", which passes the device name (eg, /dev/hdc).
This parameter format works great for programs that expect it, but XMMS just gets a segfault if it is passed a device (/dev/hdc) instead of a directory (/mnt/cdrom) or a file it understands. So we need to translate /dev/hd* into the appropriate mounted directory. /etc/fstab has the necessary information, we just need to parse it and pass it to XMMS.
There are two places this can be done. One is a per-user setting, the other place you can edit will change CD behavior system-wide, and can only be done as root.
If you can only change your own settings, or want to make changes on a per-user basis, run gnome-cd-properties. Set the command for audio CD's to "/usr/bin/xmms `awk '$1=="'%d'" {print $2}' /etc/fstab`" and click Exit.
If you want to make a system-wide change, open a console, su to root, then use your favourite editor to change the "launch kscd" line in /etc/dynamic/user-scripts/audio_cd.script to "launch xmms `awk '$1=="'$DEV'" {print $2}' /etc/fstab`". Save, and exit.
To test your changes, put a CD into the drive. XMMS should open with the CD's tracks in the playlist, and begin playing.
I hope this helps someone.
# posted by Sam @ 11:39 PM | 
