The XMMS (X Multimedia System) multimedia player provides a compact, graphical interface for playing music fi les in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and other audio formats. XMMS has some nice extras too, including an equalizer, a playlist editor, and the capability to add more audio plug-ins.
One of its greatest attributes is that XMMS is easy to use. If the player looks familiar to you, that’s because it is styled after the Windows Winamp program.
To add XMMS to your Fedora system, type yum install xmms* as root user. This command gets you the player and some nice skins to use with it as well. To play MP3 audio with XMMS, you
need to add the MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Player plug-in. In Fedora, you can get the xmms-mp3 package from the http://rpmfusion.org free repository.
Start the XMMS audio player by selecting Sound & Video ➪ Audio Player or by typing xmms from a Terminal window. Figure 4-5 shows the XMMS audio player. The skin I selected (right-click XMMS and select Options ➪ Skin Browser) is called ColderXMMS.
FIGURE 4-5
Play Ogg Vorbis and other audio files from the XMMS player.
As noted earlier, you can play several audio fi le formats. Supported formats include MP3 (with added plug-in)
Ogg Vorbis
WAV
AU
CD Audio
CIN Movies
Note
If XMMS is not able to fi nd a confi gured sound card, it redirects its output to the Disk Writer plug-in. This causes the fi les you play to be written to hard disk as WAV fi les.
You can get many more audio plug-ins from www.xmms.org. The XMMS audio player can be used in the following way:
1. Obtain music fi les by ripping songs from a CD or copying them from the Web so that they are in an accessible directory, or by inserting a music CD in your CD-ROM drive.
(XMMS expects the CD to be accessible from /dev/cdrom.)
2. From the Applications menu, select Sound & Video ➪ Audio Player. The X Multimedia System player appears.
3. Click the Eject button. The Load Files window appears.
4. If you have inserted a CD, the contents of /mnt/cdrom appear in the Files pane. Select the fi les you want to add to your Playlist and click the Add Selected Files or the Add All
Files in Directory button to add all songs from the current directory. To add audio fi les from your fi le system, browse your fi les and directories and click the same buttons to add the audio fi les you want. Select Close.
5. Click the Play List button (the tiny button marked PL) on the console. A Playlist Editor window appears.
6. Double-click the music fi le, and it starts to play.
7. With a fi le selected and playing, here are a few actions you can take:
Control play
—Buttons for controlling play are what you would expect to see on a standalone CD player. From left to right, the buttons let you go to a previous track, play, pause, stop, go to the next track, and eject the CD. The eject button opens a window, enabling you to load the next fi le.
Adjust sound
—Use the left slider bar to adjust the volume. Use the right slider bar to change the right-to-left balance.
Display time
—Click in the elapsed time area to toggle between elapsed time and time remaining.
View file information
—Click the button in the upper-left corner of the screen to see the XMMS menu. Then select View File Info. You can often fi nd out a lot of infor-mation about the fi le: title, artist, album, comments, and genre. For an Ogg Vorbis fi le, you can see specifi c information about the fi le itself, such as the format, bit rate, sample rate, frames, fi le size, and more. You can change or add to the tag information and click Save to keep it.
8. When you are done playing music, click the Stop button to stop the current song. Then click the X in the lower-right corner of the display to close the window.
Special features of the XMMS audio player let you adjust frequencies using a graphic equalizer and gather and play songs using a Playlist Editor. Click the button marked EQ next to the balance bar on the player to open the Equalizer.
Using the Equalizer
The Equalizer lets you use slider bars to set different levels to different frequencies played. Bars on the left adjust lower frequencies, and those on the right adjust higher frequencies. Click the EQ button to open the Equalizer window. Here are tasks you can perform with the Equalizer:
If you like the settings you have for a particular song, you can save them as a Preset. Set
each frequency as you like it and click the Preset button. Then choose Save ➪ Preset.
Type a name for the preset and click OK.
To reload a preset you created earlier, click the Preset button and select Load
➪ Preset.
Select the preset you want and click OK.
The small window in the center/top of the Equalizer shows the sound wave formed by your set-tings. You can adjust the Preamp bar on the left to boost different levels in the set range.
Using the Playlist Editor
The Playlist Editor lets you put together a list of audio fi les that you want to play. You can add and delete fi les from this list, save them to a fi le, and use them again later. Click the PL button in the XMMS window to open the Playlist Editor.
The Playlist Editor enables you to Add files to the playlist
—Click the Add button. The Load Files window appears.
Select the directory containing your audio fi les (it’s useful to keep them all in one place) from the left column. Then either select a fi le from the right column and click Add Selected Files or click Add All Files in the Directory. Click OK. The selected fi le or fi les appear(s) in the playlist. You can also add music fi les by dragging them from the Nautilus fi le manager onto the playlist window.
Select files to play
—To select from the fi les in the playlist, use the previous track and next track buttons in the main XMMS window. The selected fi le is highlighted. Click the Play button to play that fi le. Alternatively, you can double-click any fi le in the play-list to start it playing.
Delete files from the playlist
—To remove fi les from the playlist, select the fi le or fi les you want to remove (use the next track and previous track buttons), right-click the play-list window, and click Remove ➪ Selected. The selected fi les are removed.
Save the playlist
—To save the current playlist, hold the right mouse button down on the List button and then select Playlist ➪ Save List from the pop-up menu. Browse to the directory you want, and then type the name you want to assign to the playlist and click OK. The fi lename should end with a .m3u extension, such as monkees_hits.m3u. Load the playlist
—To reload a saved playlist, click the List button. Select a playlist from the directory in which you saved it and click OK.
There is also a tiny set of buttons on the bottom of the Playlist Editor screen. These are the same buttons as those on the main screen used for selecting different tracks or playing, pausing, stop-ping, or ejecting the current track.
One of the most fun aspects to XMMS is that you can change the skin, or the look, of the user interface. XMMS skins allow you to see wildly different interfaces, even though the application remains the same. Not only can you control the looks of XMMS, you can also use skins to adjust for any issues in the XMMS interface. For example, the current song in the playlist window may not be highlighted enough, especially if you have a high-resolution monitor. You can select a skin that provides better highlighting. You can also choose skins that make XMMS look like Winamp on Windows, or like the Mac OS X interface.
XMMS supports Windows .wsz Winamp skins, so you can download those skins and see your favorite musician or animated characters for your music player. Just download and copy the skin to your /usr/share/xmms/Skins directory to add it to your skins list.