Music
When you insert an Audio CD into Kubuntu, the system will recognize it, mount it, and start the KDE Daemon. Choose Play to start playing the CDs in KSCD. If you are connected to the Internet, KSCD will retrieve the CD artist, title, and track data from freedb.org. You can also retrieve information from other sources by clicking on the Extras
To start KSCD manually, choose → → .
To play the CD, click the Play button. To play a particular track, select the track from the drop down list at the top.
When you insert an Audio CD into Kubuntu, the system will recognize it, mount it, and start the KDE Daemon. Choose Extract and Encode audio tracks to launch KaudioCreator.
To start KaudioCreator manually, choose → → from the desktop menu system.
Inside KaudioCreator, you will be greeted with the list of songs, in order of their track number. If the CD you are ripping is an original CD (not a mix/back-up disk), then most of the song titles should be detected automatically if you are connected to the Internet. If not, click the disk in the top left hand corner to try again.
Select what tracks you want to rip, or all of them by pressing Select all tracks
To begin the ripping process, press the Rip Selection in the toolbar. When the ripping process has started, you can watch your progress by pressing the Jobs tab. By default, the files rip into /home/username/ogg directory, and are in the Ogg Vorbis (ogg) format. They are neatly sorted by artist, followed by album, and lastly song.
When you are done ripping your CD tracks, press the eject button to eject your CD-Rom.
You can use the preferences window to control where the extracted audio files are stored on your computer, the filename of extracted audio files, and the file format and codec used for the files. In the main window, choose → .
KAudioCreator can extract audio files to the following formats:
Ogg Vorbis - Ogg Vorbis is a patent-free lossy audio compression format which typically produces higher quality and greater compression than MP3. See the Vorbis website for more information.
FLAC - FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio Codec. It can compress audio files up to 50% without removing any information from the audio stream. For more information on this format, see the FLAC homepage on sourceforge.net.
WAV - Wav is an uncompressed audio format, which can be compressed into OGG Vorbis or a codec of your choice. It is often used while working on sound in applications like Audacity, before being compressed.
You can also extract CD audio files to the proprietary non-free MP3 format by using the lame encoder. See the KAudioCreator Handbook (Offline Help).
Kubuntu does not directly support the MP3 format, because it is restricted by patents and proprietary rights. Instead Kubuntu supports the Ogg Vorbis format out of the box, a completely free, open and non-patented format. Ogg Vorbis files also sound better then MP3 files of the same file size and are supported by many popular music players (a list of players is here).
You can still play your old MP3 files by installing MP3 support (see the section called “Multimedia Codecs”). Instructions for other formats, such as Windows Media Audio (wma/wmv) and other patent encumbered formats can be found on the Ubuntu Wiki.
The default music application on your Kubuntu system is the AmaroK Music Player, a music management and playback application that looks like iTunes. When you first start AmaroK, it will scan your home directory for any supported music files you have and add it to the database. To start AmaroK, choose → → .
AmaroK has an inbuilt ID3 tag editor that can edit the metadata on your OGG and other music files. Please see the amaroK handbook (Offline Help) for details on how to edit the metadata.
You can play music directly off your iPod with AmaroK. Simply plug your iPod into the computer, and open AmaroK.
To transfer music files to and from an iPod, you can use AmaroK as well. Please see the amaroK handbook (Offline Help) on how to manage media files in your iPod.
Audacity is a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. To use Audacity:
Install the audacity package from the Universe repository (see the section called “Managing Repositories”).
To run Audacity, choose → → .
For further help about using Audacity, consult the program's help by choosing → .
