Does amarok 2 play audio CDs? I did not find any option for it. When I enter audiocd:/ in filechooser, I could see content of the CD but I can't neither move the tracks to playlist nor play them directly.

I have amarok 2.0.0 from kubuntu 8.10

thanks Karel

No, Amarok 2 does not currently play Audio CDs.

We developers don't find this an important feature, as it takes about 3 minutes to fully rip a CD to harddisk with modern software. And this gives you so many advantages, that it's just not worth messing with the CD media from the 80s.


PS: Technically, playing an Audio CD with modern computers is the same thing as ripping. Just that you're not saving the ripped data to your harddisk.

ok, thanks for info. However I still think it would be great when amarok support it. Are you going to implement this feature later?

Maybe

I hope you decide to support CD playing. I often borrow a CD from my husband, who loves C&W music, and will want only a track or two at most. If I can play it in Amarok, then it's easy to decide which tracks to rip. I would rather do that than rip the entire CD and then delete the unwanted tracks one by one.

I would also vote for Amarok to read CD's as I have often used other people's CD to show off Amarok and many have switched to Linux just to use it. The CD function is a very usefull tool in promoting Amarok. Please bring it back.

BTW ... I also used to use Amarok to test new systems for CD playability and am now using Kaffeine as test software and telling people to use Kaffeine as their CD player. I would rather refer people to Amarok as it is a much better piece of music playing software.

Please reconsider. There are just too many using their computers as CD players (my mother is 75 and up until this last version she was using it quite successfully. She is now using Kaffeine.)

Marc

I'd like to add my vote for playing CDs, too.  I like Amarok as my "one-stop shopping" for playing music, since it is so much better than KsCD (Which I still can't always get to work!).  There are lots of reasons for playing and not ripping a CD, for instance, the CD is borrowed with the intention of returning, and ripping it would violate copyright laws.  I oftentimes want to play a CD on my laptop, but don't want to proliferate my collection to its harddrive.

I realized it's not the most important feature, but surely is one you'd expect in a player like Amarok!

Mark Kretschmann wrote:We developers don't find this an important feature, as it takes about 3 minutes to fully rip a CD to harddisk with modern software. And this gives you so many advantages, that it's just not worth messing with the CD media from the 80s.

Hi Mark. I really have to pick you up on this one I'm afraid.

The reason I found this thread (and then joined this forum to comment) is that last night I was at an event using my laptop to do karaoke with kmid, when someone came along unexpectedly wanting to sing some songs with a backing track on CD.  I didn't want to rip the CD, I wanted to play it - instantly.  My laptop, newly updated to Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, launched kscd by default and that no longer worked - no sound.  So I tried amarok as I would have done by default in Ubuntu Intrepid, but suddenly could find no way of playing CDs.  In my panic I didn't think of trying other things like Kaffeine (which works fine) but instead borrowed a portable CD player from one of the guests.

So there's a real-world example of how CDs still have importance.

Another example is that a lot of people are not geeks and play music using good old-fashioned CD players (especially in the car).  This means that I burn quite a lot of them (not breaking copyright law in case you were wondering), and it's useful to be able to check them by flicking through the tracks.  I can no longer do this with Amarok.

My experience of ripping CDs doesn't bear any resemblance to yours either.  I've got a desktop machine with two 16x DVD writers of different makes, and neither of them rip CDs at more than about 5 x maximum, even if it will burn them much more quickly.  No way could I rip even a 45-minute CD in 3 minutes.  Dunno if there's something wrong with my software, but it's not as if it isn't modern.

PS: Technically, playing an Audio CD with modern computers is the same thing as ripping. Just that you're not saving the ripped data to your harddisk.

In the UK it is illegal to rip a CD for which you don't own the copyright, even if it is your own.  I know that doesn't stop anyone, but it's still worth pointing out.  Playing may be technically the same as ripping, but it is not legally the same.

So there you go.  I'm more than a bit surprised that this "powerful music player" that "makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before" won't even let you pop a CD into the drive that every computer bigger than a netbook has, and play it.  Especially as it used to.

For what it's worth, we now have a patch that allows playing and ripping of CDs

It's too late for inclusion in 2.1.0 (feature freeze), but it might make it into later 2.1.x releases, or into 2.2.

Where do I get that patch?

I have not made this patch widely available yet as it makes some pretty deep changes to core parts of Amarok and needs a lot of testing and polish. Also, it piggybacks on the audiocd:/ protocol which itself has some issues that affects CD playback ( detection mostly ) in Amarok.

I guess if anyone really wants to try it out, and are comfortable with building Amarok from source, I can post the patch somewhere as feedback would be nice.

I blogged about the experimental CD support here. There is also a link to a patch for the brave

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/index.php?ur ... ction.html

Mark Kretschmann wrote:No, Amarok 2 does not currently play Audio CDs.

We developers don't find this an important feature, as it takes about 3 minutes to fully rip a CD to harddisk with modern software. And this gives you so many advantages, that it's just not worth messing with the CD media from the 80s.

PS: Technically, playing an Audio CD with modern computers is the same thing as ripping. Just that you're not saving the ripped data to your harddisk.

With all due respect, excluding CD playback is a really poor design decision.  As others on this thread have mentioned, the convenience of being able to play a CD regardless of the decision to keep a copy of it on the hard drive seems like a no-brainer.  Is there a "technical" reason to not play an Audio CD multiple times?

As I type this, my computer has stalled on the attempt to rip a CD.  All I wanted to do was listen to it using amarok.  I'm willing to guess that if I were just playing the track, any program's algorithms would probably skip the small area causing the rip hangup.

I hope to see Audio CD playback in future versions.

vivek,

please see the blog linked int he comment above yours.

I join everyone who vote for CD playback!
I'm not ready to compile Amarok (i'm not so sure if it gonna work after my compilation) with a patch, but I am waiting for the upcoming version with this feature.

P.S.
Now I use 2.1. Beta 2, and I like the way it grows: I disliked Amarok 2.0, but this thing is good! Hope to see it even better.