[PLUG] Getting a red Hat system to play audio files

Michael Hopcroft mhopcroft at seraphimguard.com
Tue Jun 10 23:33:02 UTC 2003


On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 22:31, Wil Cooley wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 13:56, Michael Hopcroft wrote:
> > Red hat 9 has one glaring weakness. the deliberately disabled MP3
> > support, making their audio player virtually useless. Worse, the video
> > player (which is supposed to have MP3 support) that I just downloaded
> > not only won;t play MP3 files (it starts the files but no sound comes
> > out) but it won't play the audio track on my video files. Is there
> > something in the Red Hat system that blocks out those audio standards
> > from ALL pieces of software, or is there some RPM or code I can install
> > that would re-enable MP3 and audio?
> 
> See http://www.xmms.org or http://freshrpms.net for a replacement XMMS.

I downloaded a replacement xmms. Installing it is another matter
entirely -- I have yet to master RPMs. I'm certainly having a great deal
of difficulty installing any software that does NOT come in RPM form.
The replacement xmms I downloaded is for Red Hat 8. I don;t know if Red
Hat has some code that defeats my attempts to install it over the xmms
that came with the distro or not (I bought the CD package you can get
for $41 at Office Depot and $40 at Fry's.)

As far as getting audio itself to work, however, I managed to solve that
problem. One of the list members sent me a not encouraging me to
brainstorm the situation through a little more. It turned out I had a
bad connection between my sound card and my speakers. Once I
straightened that out (by physically moving the speaker plug) audio
plays. I even got the Video/DVD player I installed to play MP3 files.

This leads to a new problem, though -- whenever I click on an MP3 file
in XWindow, it takes me to xmms in its current, crippled state, It's
sort of like a Windows file association problem -- the files are linked
to a program you don;t want them to be linked to. I don;t know if even
installing the repaired xmms would solve that particular problem because
I don;t know if Red hat will simply install it beside the current
version or replace the disabled version with the fixed one. I don't know
why red Hat crippled one of the major reasons people own computers these
days (to play media files), but I'm sure they have their reasons (not
sound ones, mind you, but reasons).





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