[NCLUG] Music on DVD player

Matt Taggart matt at lackof.org
Fri Jun 14 11:21:52 MDT 2002


Idris S Hamid writes...

> Dear folks,
> 
> My dvd player plays music fine on my Windows partition, but I cannot mount
> the dvd drive on Linux for music cd's (it works fine for data cd's). Here is
> the message:
> 
> Could not mount device.
> The reported error was:
> /dev/dvd: Input/output error
> mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified

You can't mount music CDs, as the error above is telling you, they don't have 
a filesystem on them (well except for those rare "multimedia" CDs). CD playing 
software just accesses the device directly and tells it to play, stop, rew, 
ff, etc. Then the music it played (analog) out of a special cable from the 
drive that connects into the soundcard where it is mixed with your other audio 
sources (like computer sounds, and other inputs). The are several mixers 
available for Linux including aumix(text) and the mixers that come with Gnome 
and KDE. This is the normal setup.

If you don't have a sound card
------------------------------
You can still use the CD playing software to control the drive and then plug 
your headphone/speakers into the CD drive.

If you don't have the cable that connects the CD drive and the soundcard
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some CD players have support for reading the music over the data bus (IDE or 
SCSI) which is also known as "ripping"(like you'd do when encoding mp3s) and 
then playing it through the soundcard. The XMMS program has support for doing 
this. It's a very inefficient way of doing things since it wastes I/O 
bandwidth and will slow other I/O down, but it works. Use this as an interim 
approach until you can buy the $2 cable to connect your CD drive and 
soundcard. I have a collection of various kinds of these cable that I can 
bring to HackingSociety if needed, just ask.

HTH,

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org





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