Hello,
First post here. Sorry if I make some mistakes.
I’m using Manjaro KDE, which I installed recently on my desktop PC. The DVD drive works, apparently, as I’ve been able to play DVDs and install video games from it. However, when trying to play a music CD, I found myself unable to get the music to play. I have tried with several CDs.
Upon inserting, the usual Plasma message prompting to mount and open pops up, and I can see the CD contents in Dolphin.
VLC deals strange results. When I open a track with it, it takes a long time to load it and, when it does, the CD spins really fast. If I try to open the CD from “Media > Open Disc”, it fails with the following message:
Su entrada no puede abrirse:
VLC es incapaz de abrir el MRL «cdda:///dev/sr0». Vea el registro para más detalles.
Sorry, I have Spanish as locale.
This is VLC’s log:
-- logger module started --
main: Ejecutar vlc con la interfaz predeterminada. Use «cvlc» para usar vlc sin interfaz.
main: playlist is empty
main error: option cd-audio does not exist
If running vlc from the command-line works, it would suggest there’s something wrong with the way the path’s being passed to vlc, rather than a vlc problem. vlc /dev/sr0
Though another thought is that vlc’s plugins were split into a number of different packages one or two updates ago. Perhaps there’s one of those that you need?
An Audio CD does not contain .wav files - RIAA would not be happy any OS if copyright audio could just be copied to a hard drive instead of using CD ripping software
The audio contained in a CD-DA consists of two-channel signed 16-bit LPCM sampled at 44,100 Hz and written as a little-endian interleaved stream with left channel coming first.
As Nik said - the screenshot doesn’t look like audiocd. There is a special form of cd format - mixed data+audio, which maybe confuses the system if this is it, but i have not touched such thing since 20 years and i have long forgotten…the mixed format was problematic even back then so i quickly switched to data only cds.
I have exactly 1 audio CD left, so I tried to play it. It works in VLC, but I do have nearly every vlc plugin installed.
You may want to also install audiocd-kio
@nikgnomic@Teo
Actually the CD I used to test have .wav files, not homemade, came with a DVD I bought.
Every audio CD is displayed like that. I suppose that’s not really the content of the CD, but the way Manjaro or Dolphin display it.
I had doubts when I tried the first CD, but then I tried with others and all show in that way. The one shown in the screenshot is definitely not home made. The screenshot posted by @ydar is further proof of that.
As I mentioned in my original post, audiocd-kio is already installed. However vlc_plugin-cddb is not, so I’ll try that and let you know.
OK. That was it… for the most part. Installing vlc-plugin-cddb solved the issue with VLC. It plays CDs when selected from the media menu or the Plasma prompt that appear when the CD is inserted.
No tracks show up in Elisa, though. It’s not a big deal, as VLC is generally my player of choice. But I’m curious why Elisa can’t play them though.
The CD contains only digital audio content. Dolphin (and some others) effectively translate it to various other audio formats, allowing to easily drag a track from the CD ( as wav, flac, ogg vorbis, and even mp3).
I imagine video from some DVDs might be manipulated in the same fashion, but I haven’t tried it.
The concept isn’t new; I recall in Windows 9x/Me there was a re-engineered cdfs.vxd file floating around the internet that achieved much the same thing. Of course, that was at a time when such things were greatly frowned upon by Record Companies.
Without this feature of Dolphin we might need a separate ripper app of some kind, and then have to again convert the ripped data to the format we prefer.
KIO AudioCD is a KIO worker that enables KIO-aware applications (such as Dolphin or k3b) to access audio and CD text data on the audio compact disks. It allows transparent drag and drop conversion of audio data into the popular formats and has a configuration System Settings module available in the “Multimedia” section.
Extends: Dolphin | Konqueror | Krusader
That’s because of the kio framework in Plasma — it actually already goes back to a time long before the desktop was renamed from “KDE” to “Plasma”.
An audio CD does not have a filesystem on it, but kio displays the tracks as individual .wav files, allowing you to drag and drop them onto your Linux filesystems as such.
It was a knockoff of the cdfs kernel driver in Linux, which allowed one to mount an audio CD as if it were a regular filesystem, and one could then use vplay at the command line to play the individual tracks.
It was a neat feature, and I don’t know whether it’s still available. I remember briefly looking for it in the Manjaro repository at one point in the past and not finding it, but then again, the last time I ever put an optical disk in my DVD writer was many years ago.
That’s really interesting. I was suspecting something like that, but I was really surprised when I saw that behavior for the first time. For a moment, it led me to believe it was a badly made bootleg.
I’m marking this as solved by @nikgnomic’s suggestion:
I still don’t get why Elisa is unable to play the CDs, but at least I can play them now, so it’s not a big deal.
Dolphin 
Konqueror 
Krusader
