Bruce Dubbs wrote: >There certainly are a lot of audio apps in BLFS. I'm going to try to >explore them a bit more. There are lots of configuration issues to >check.
Don't know if it helps, but here's some information on audio apps and libraries. The three major multimedia players I use are vlc, mplayer and xine. They have GUI front-ends as well. VLC is typically run via GUI. mplayer is typically command line and has front-ends like smplayer. xine has quite a few front ends. I personally prefer xineui (X11 GUI) and flxine (FLTK GUI). I should also mention mencoder which typically comes with mplayer. It's a nice command line tool that can be used to convert file formats. The media players handle video but also handle music/audio, so I don't typically use a separate audio player. However, audacious and qmmp aren't bad if you just need a more dedicated audio player. They kind of remind me of xmplay. xmplay has a really nice visualization tool that draws graphics while you're listening to music. As far as visualization is concerned, I haven't found a lot of Open Source applications that support it. I tried the tool with qmmp (projectM), but it crashes with my video card. flxine uses the GOOM library (part of xine) for visualization and does a nice job. There's also a stand-alone visualization library that uses SDL called fische ( http://26elf.at/ ). It can be built with portaudio, so that anything that uses portaudio will work with it. ogg123 and mpg123 are command line front ends/utilities to libraries for handling specific audio files types. When you build the major media players, libraries to handle those formats are either included in their source code or linked as shared libraries. Personally, I find it easier to run mplayer to play ogg and mp3 files than I do to run the separate utilities. There are some formats you didn't mention and that aren't typically handled well by media players. Those include midi, Karaoke midi and mod. Timidity++ (with FreePats soundfonts) is great for playing midi and mod files. Milkytracker also gives good sound quality for mod files. You can use Milkytracker to create your own mod files. I also use abc2midi to create my own Karaoke midi files. Also, if I'm just interested in playing audio files (like wave, ogg, etc.) and not multimedia, I'll typically use audacity. Read an interesting article comparing the audio backends, such as alsa, oss, esd (enlightment sound daemon) portaudio, pulseaudio, gstreamer, jack, phonon, etc. Typically, the lowest level sound libraries are alsa or oss. Alsa works on Linux only. Oss is used on most Unix/BSD machines and typically on some Linux systems geared to older computers with less resources. There is an OSS compatibility layer for Alsa. Most of the other libraries just mentioned work on top of alsa and/or oss. Some were created by GUI libraries to handle audio in the same way. Some like portaudio were created for cross-platform development. Jack is the system musicians typically use. (Audacity has an option to work with jack.) I'll typically try to keep things less complicated on my systems and stick with alsa or oss and jack if needed. Some more info on the libraries in these articles: http://tuxradar.com/content/how-it-works-linux-audio-explained http://xed.ch/help/sound.html Another thing to keep in mind with audio players is format, lossy versus lossy. I typically prefer lossless formats, especially for music. So, I typically prefer working with wave or flac (lossless) files over ogg or mp3 formats (lossy). There are several codecs (and their libraries) out there for lossy and lossless compression/decompression. With cd tools, there's an interesting split between the original cdrtools ( http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/cdrecord.html ) and the forked version cdrkit (with wodim, icedax, genisoimage) created by Debian because of licensing issues. Don't know if one's better than the other, but I often read about how one system will work with certain CD players while the other won't. cdrtools seems to be more cross-platform portable. That doesn't even cover GUI cd programs and the various video tools out there (such as utilities for creating SVCDs or DVDs). I have a list of some of the lightweight tools I've used for various audio, video and CD functions listed at http://www.distasis.com/cpp/osrclist.htm if anyone's curious. Am always interested in learning more about what's out there. Would enjoy hearing what audio/video applications others are using on their systems and if they recommend any particular programs. Sincerely, Laura -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
