[sclug] xmms

[Taiyo Rawle]

--- Major Stuart <stuartmajor at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone now the default settings for xmms saving
> .wav files to my home directory?  It was saving them
> to file:/home/spookie/wav.  I foolishly changed
> them. 

Umm... You can try an 

$ls -R | grep .wav 

from your home directory to list all of the .wav files
in it and all of it's subdirectories (the -R flag
tells  ls to recursively list all subdirs)

> Oops!
> Also how do I save with the artist name, album name,
> track name and filetype?

Try using grip - it's a CD ripper and encoder frontend
that uses freedb to retrieve album and track
information: http://nostatic.org/grip/
There should be an rpm for suse.

> I am very new to digital music and is a .wav the
> same
> as a .mp3?  Can I get xmms to save in .mp3 format? 
> How do I do this?

.wav is rather different from mp3 - a wave is
uncompressed audio, while an mp3 is (at 128kbps) about
1/11th of the size of the original .wav.

To save a .wav as a .mp3 then you need an encoder.
There are many FLOSS encoders around, and grip can use
nearly all of them.

Also, the Ogg Vorbis format is a patent-free (and
somewhat superior) alternative to mp3, however alot of
portable devices do not support it. Iriver and Neuros
are two that do though. FLAC is another compressed
format that can squash a wave by up to a half with no
losses (FLAC=Free Lossless Audio Codec)

The thing is that XMMS is essentially an audio player
application, whereas to create/save/rip audio you're
better off with an application written just for that.

There's a humungus load of FLOSS audio applications
out there, from players like XMMS through to full-on
studio mastering apps like ardour (http://ardour.org/)

The whole digital audio shebang can seem a little
daunting at first, but it's not difficault to pick up,
let us know how you get on! For
ripping/encoding/playing/track naming, etc. I'm fine
with just XMMS and grip. 

> Thanks, Stuart.
> 
> Am running Suse 9.0 with kernel 2.4.21-243-athlon
> Would like to use Amarok but can not as yet find
> rpm.
> Also would like to use Suse 9.2/3 (any good?) and...
> KDE 3 something but not quite ready to do all that,
> perhaps another Linux User Day? 

Hmm, I'd upgrade too, things have come a long way
since the 2.4 kernel and KDE2. I'm unsure with how
SUSE goes about upgrading the whole distro, but if
it's anything like recent Mandrake/Mandriva releases
then it *should* be fairly painless. Amarok is a cool
app, but it is rather heavyweight compared to XMMS,
IMHO.

Cheers!
-Taiyo


		
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