Playing Audio CD-ROMs

You need a special application to play audio CD-ROMs in the CD-ROM drive. Both GNOME and KDE come with CD Players.

Before using any CD Player program, make sure you unmount any CD-ROM currently in the drive (use the umount/dev/cdrom command), remove the CD-ROM, and place an audio CD-ROM in the drive. To play the audio CD-ROM, you must also have a sound card and the appropriate sound drivers installed, as described in earlier sections of this chapter.

If you are using the GNOME desktop, you can play audio CD-ROMs by using the CD Player application. You can launch the GNOME CD Player by selecting Main Menu>Sound & Video>CD Player. Figure 5-2 shows this CD player playing a track from an audio CD. As you can see, the CD Player displays the title of the CD and the name of the current track. The CD Player gets the song titles from CDDB—a CD database on the Internet. This means you need an active Internet connection for the CD Player to download song information from the CD database. Once the CD Player downloads information about a particular CD, it caches that information in a local database for future use.

Figure 5-2: The GNOME CD Player Playing a Track from an Audio CD.

The CD Player’s user interface is intuitive, and you can learn it easily. One nice feature is that you have the ability to select a track by title, as shown in Figure 5-3.

Figure 5-3: Selecting a Specific Audio Track to Play with the CD Player.

Insider Insight

To learn more about CDDB, read the Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.cddb.com/faq.html.

If you want to log in as a normal user and play audio CD-ROMs on the CD-ROM drive, you should first log in as root and set the permissions settings on the CD-ROM device so that anyone can read it. (You have to set the permissions for the actual CD-ROM device, not the generic /dev/cdrom device.) To do this, follow these steps:

Log in as root. If you are already logged in, type su -, and enter the super user’s password to assume the identity of root.
Type ls –l /dev/cdrom and find the actual device for which /dev/cdrom is a symbolic link. For example, in my case, /dev/hdc is the physical device, as the output of the ls -l /dev/cdrom command indicates:
```
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root  8 Jan 23 19:16 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc
```
Make the CD-ROM device readable by all users by using the chmod command as follows:
```
chmod o+r /dev/hdc
```
Anyone who has access to your Red Hat Linux PC can now play audio CD-ROMs and access the CD-ROM drive. Note, however, that anyone with access to the PC, including anyone who can remotely log in, can now read data CD-ROMs as well.

If you use KDE as your desktop, you can find a similar audio CD Player in KDE. Start the KDE CD Player by selecting Main Menu>Sound & Video>KsCD.