Playing Digital Music Files
Digital audio has become very popular in recent years. Users enjoy
the technology because the sound quality is excellent compared to analog
tape or records and the files are compact, so an audio file can easily
be transferred across the Internet.
To allow you to take advantage of this technology, Red Hat Linux includes
the powerful X Multimedia System
(XMMS), a cross-platform multimedia player
that allows you to play several digital music file formats.
XMMS can be used for more than just
playing digital audio files. By default XMMS
can play Ogg Vorbis, RIFF wave, and most module
formats. XMMS can be extended through plugins
to play a number of other digital multimedia formats.
To launch XMMS, go to => =>
.
To launch XMMS from a shell prompt, type
the command xmms.
Using XMMS
To play an audio file with XMMS, click
the Open button 
and choose a file from the Load
File(s) window.
In Figure 9-4, you see that there are
several files to choose from. The files that end in
.ogg are Ogg Vorbis files,
a popular new audio file format; the .pls file is
an audio playlist file. You can use
XMMS to add audio files into a list and
then save it as a playlist. This can be convenient if you have several
audio files and you want to categorize them (for example, by genre or
artist). Highlight the file you wish to play (if you have more than
one, you can click and hold the mouse button and drag it over all of
the files you want to open) and click
OK. Notice that XMMS
begins to play your audio files immediately. To adjust the volume
click the volume slider (the long slider above the
Open button) to the left to lower the volume, and
to the right to increase it. There are also buttons to stop, pause,
and skip (backward and forward) your music.
There is so much more you can do with
XMMS. To learn more about using
XMMS, refer to the man page by typing
man xmms at a shell prompt.
