Multimedia
- SliTaz sound and video.
- Configure the sound card.
- Alsamixer - Mixer.
- Alsaplayer - Audio Player.
- Asunder - Audio CD Ripper.
- MPD - Music Player Daemon.
- mpg123 - Command line audio player.
- Mplayer - Movie Player.
- Xine - Multimedia Player.
SliTaz sound and video
SliTaz LiveCD mode provides sound support, but no video player**, however you can watch YouTube by installing
the get-flash-plugin package. To watch videos you can use Xine, it supports most formats such
as avi, mov, mpeg, etc. Note Xine can also act as an audio player. At the sound level, you have a mixer
(alsamixer) and audio player (alsaplayer), both installed by default on the standard LiveCD. SliTaz also
provides tools to configure your sound card.
Configure the sound card
In LiveCD mode SliTaz automatically configures the sound card by launching a dialog. In most cases the sound card is instantly recognized and you just press ENTER to continue to login and have your sound working. However, sometimes your card is not recognized at startup or simply not supported. Before throwing in the towel, you can try to manually configure your card by asking for help on the discussion list or on the hardware support forum.
Soundconf
To configure or reconfigure a sound card, SliTaz provides a script (soundconf), this utility
is used at startup and doesn't pose any questions, supports the right modules and automatically configures
/etc/rsS.conf so that the right driver is loaded on each start. Soundconf will also
automatically adjust volume levels, you can change the settings later through the mixer and
alsactl. To start the sound configuration interface, you must have administrator priviledges
and type:
# soundconf
Alsactl
Alsactl controls alsa and can store settings or restore sound for example, to retain
preferences for each start. When configuring sound with soundconf, volumes are automatically adjusted. You
can use alsamixer as root to change the values and then launch alsactl
to store the configuration:
# alsactl store
To restore the configuration, you can use the alsactl restore command or to restore your
preferences at each system startup you can edit /etc/init.d/local.sh with your favorite text editor or simply
'echo' the changes:
# echo 'alsactl restore' > /etc/init.d/local.sh
Alsamixer
Alsamixer is the official mixer of the Alsa project. It is simple and effective and can be run from the
menu or directly from a terminal. The volumes can be regulated with the up/down arrows or muted using
the m key. To start from a Linux terminal:
$ alsamixer
Alsaplayer
The audio player Alsaplayer is designed to be simple, clean and intuitive. Alsaplayer on SliTaz provides support for ogg, mp3 (via libmad) and wav files, playlists and viewers to accompany sound and the ability to adjust pitch and volume. Once launched from the menu just click the play button or load a playlist to start.
Asunder - Audio CD Ripper
Asunder retrieves and encodes audio tracks from a CD. The toolkit is simple and easy to use, encoding
songs into wav, ogg or mp3 (via lame package). It can search CDDB, create playlists and
edit file names. You will find Asunder in the Multimedia category on the menu.
MPD - Music Player Daemon
MPD is a great little music player that uses the server/client architecture, this means it can be even
run remotely without a X server operating. To install MPD on SliTaz: tazpkg get-install mpd.
MPD on SliTaz drops root priviledges, so to start the server, just run:
$ mpd
And to stop it:
$ mpd --kill
Simply drag your music files into the ~/music folder (or create a link) and then run mpd --create-db as root to update the database
and you're ready to use one of the many clients. The mpd --version command lets you have a full list of available formats and outputs.
MPC - Music Player Client
MPC is a popular client for MPD, to load all the files into MPC from the MPD database
and start to play them, simply install: tazpkg get-install mpc and run:
$ mpc add / $ mpc play
The command mpc --help gives you a full list of all the available options that allow you to edit the playlist, enable crossfade,
adjust the volume and shuffle tracks, etc.
mpg123
Mpg123 is a command line audio player and file converter. This means that you can listen to music or
convert files from a terminal. To display help, use the --help option.
To play a mp3 file, just launch mpg123 followed by the name of the audio file:
$ mpg123 sound.mp3
Mpg123 can also encode a file into another format, for example you can convert a wav file into a mp3 file. Example:
$ mpg123 -w sound.mp3 sound.wav
Mplayer
Mplayer is a popular movie player for Linux suppporting many formats including, DVD, VCD, mpeg, wmv, realvideo, etc. It can also play various audio codecs such as aac, wma, realaudio, as well as ogg, flac, etc. Mplayer is configurable via a right click menu and customizable using various skins and GUIs that easily enable you to configure your own video drivers, output devices and so on.
Xine
Xine is a multimedia project providing various video viewers and audio players. SliTaz provides libraries
and a media player contained in the package xine-ui. Xine uses a Xlib interface, a control
panel, a right click configuration menu and various plugins. It can play ogg, mp3 and flac audio codecs,
and mov, avi or mpg video formats. To install xine and its dependancies:
# tazpkg get-install xine-ui
Official Xine website
** Note: mplayer now included in 'cooking' versions.