Kubuntu and Audio CD troubles

[Potatoes2241]

Hey folks, hoping that at least one of literally dozens of weirdos who still listen to audio CDs visits LTT forum and will see this thread 

 

I've come across a very frustrating issue with Kubuntu, and I suppose any Linux distro - playing audio CDs is surprisingly complicated. Audio CDs as in albums bought from Amazon and not just MP3 collections burned on a disk, that's apparently a very serious difference. 

 

Firstly, for whatever reason even getting the system to read them is a journey. It may take between 10 seconds to literal minutes to load a CD (as in make its contents available to whatever tries to read them), sometimes randomly refuses to load at all, and other things that kind of seem like the disk or the drive lens are dirty or damaged. This is not the case however since the same drive and disk combo work flawlessly in windows. Then, when you get to run the disk, it may randomly spin down in the middle of playback and then have to re-spin the drive and take, again, up to minutes of time. Also, god knows why, it refuses to eject the disk using the button on the drive.

 

If you manage to actually get the thing going you need something to play it on, and while the general situation with music player apps in Linux is abysmal already, the situation with audio CDs is even worse. Not all audio players can even play audio CDs. Half of the native Linux players that support them (e.g. VLC and Strawberry) can’t play the CD and throw errors related to missing URI handlers or whatever, and those that can run the disk are extremely barebones and lack basic functionality like automatic tag lookup or gapless playback. And if you accept this and go on with listening it may still randomly crap out and spin down the disc.

 

And to add insult to injury, MusicBee, a brilliant app that I got running through Wine, won't play audio CDs due to how Linux handles them. It seems like Linux won't "mount" audio CDs like windows does, which makes sense since those have no file system. However windows still assigns a "drive letter" to an audio CD in your drive and makes it available to the apps (like MusicBee) to read. But so far I could not find a way to somehow emulate windows behavior and make the disk readable through Wine.

 

My pathetic attempts to troubleshoot or fix the above resulted into getting conflicts between codec libs and now I get random segmentation errors when launching some apps, but that's a whole other story.

 

I realize that spinning plastic is not the most popular audio format to put it mildly but I'm having SO MUCH trouble running them on a modern Linux distro that I need a sanity check from you guys. It can't be that bad, can it? What is your experience with this? If it matters, the drive I use is a generic external Transcend USB CD/DVD drive. Appreciate the answers in advance, it's sleepy time in my timezone, cheers.

[Biohazard777]

46 minutes ago, Potatoes2241 said:

Kubuntu

Haven't used an Audio CD in a long while, but for better integration with the rest of the KDE apps - do you have KIO AudioCD installed?
https://apps.kde.org/kio_audiocd/
 

[RollyShed]

1 hour ago, Potatoes2241 said:

playing audio CDs is surprisingly complicated.

I always use Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop.

 

What app are you using to do the playing with?

Have you tried any others?

The default is Celluloid and I change the default to Audacious.

Personally I'd copy the files to a folder on the computer. Mark and drag them on to Audacious and listen to them. If not drag, and Audacious the default player, click on the first to get it going and drag the rest into Audacious's box.

[Ralphred]

3 hours ago, Potatoes2241 said:

and throw errors related to missing URI handlers

You need to install the gstreamer plugins for cdparanoia and cdio. If you can't find them then k3b doesn't use gst, it's cddb-lookup and cdda-reading work without them, it's not a player but will rip and auto-tag CD's to your format of choice.

 

Strawberry is just a fork of Clementine from what I've seen, which in turn is just a fork of Amarok circa version 1.4. Sadly neither are quite as good as the now unmaintained original (Amarok's dynamic mood playlist was the best feature I've ever seen in a library manager/player app).

4 hours ago, Potatoes2241 said:

the same drive and disk combo work flawlessly in windows. Then, when you get to run the disk, it may randomly spin down in the middle of playback and then have to re-spin the drive

I have a suspicion this is a power issue, and your USB port can supply more that ubuntu is allowing it to. If you can get hold of a usb "dual power" cable you can prove this without messing around with your sysfs, or having to do any reading.

[YamiYukiSenpai]

4 hours ago, Potatoes2241 said:

If you manage to actually get the thing going you need something to play it on, and while the general situation with music player apps in Linux is abysmal already, the situation with audio CDs is even worse. Not all audio players can even play audio CDs. Half of the native Linux players that support them (e.g. VLC and Strawberry) can’t play the CD and throw errors related to missing URI handlers or whatever, and those that can run the disk are extremely barebones and lack basic functionality like automatic tag lookup or gapless playback. And if you accept this and go on with listening it may still randomly crap out and spin down the disc.

Have you tried with Rhythmbox? and for CD ripping, I use K3B

 

Also, run this in case it's not installed:

sudo apt install kubuntu-restricted-addons kubuntu-restricted-extras

 

4 hours ago, Potatoes2241 said:

And to add insult to injury, MusicBee, a brilliant app that I got running through Wine, won't play audio CDs due to how Linux handles them. It seems like Linux won't "mount" audio CDs like windows does, which makes sense since those have no file system. However windows still assigns a "drive letter" to an audio CD in your drive and makes it available to the apps (like MusicBee) to read. But so far I could not find a way to somehow emulate windows behavior and make the disk readable through Wine.

 

Try and see if you can add a drive and point it to your CD?

 

Note: I also buy and rip CDs, but mainly for artists and bands I love, like Taylor Swift & Eminem

[Potatoes2241]

Thank you for all the replies guys!

 

7 hours ago, Biohazard777 said:

Haven't used an Audio CD in a long while, but for better integration with the rest of the KDE apps - do you have KIO AudioCD installed?
https://apps.kde.org/kio_audiocd/
 

Yup, this one was installed out of the box

6 hours ago, RollyShed said:

I always use Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop.

 

What app are you using to do the playing with?

Have you tried any others?

The default is Celluloid and I change the default to Audacious.

Personally I'd copy the files to a folder on the computer. Mark and drag them on to Audacious and listen to them. If not drag, and Audacious the default player, click on the first to get it going and drag the rest into Audacious's box.

Had the most success with Audacious and Goobox - they play the CDs I tried. Goobox looks cool but lacks gapless playback which is a deal breaker and Audacious is a bit inconvenient but that's a minor one, at least it has gapless. The experience is still not okay though because it still takes forever to load a disk before even attempting to play it. 

 

4 hours ago, Ralphred said:

You need to install the gstreamer plugins for cdparanoia and cdio. If you can't find them then k3b doesn't use gst, it's cddb-lookup and cdda-reading work without them, it's not a player but will rip and auto-tag CD's to your format of choice.

 

Strawberry is just a fork of Clementine from what I've seen, which in turn is just a fork of Amarok circa version 1.4. Sadly neither are quite as good as the now unmaintained original (Amarok's dynamic mood playlist was the best feature I've ever seen in a library manager/player app).

I have a suspicion this is a power issue, and your USB port can supply more that ubuntu is allowing it to. If you can get hold of a usb "dual power" cable you can prove this without messing around with your sysfs, or having to do any reading.

As for gstreamer, plugins are there but I think I ended up breaking something while trying to troubleshoot the CD situation. At some point I started getting segmentation fault crashes in MusicBee and a few other apps, seemingly related to gstreamer. I'll be trying to fully purge and reinstall those later today. Cdparanoia and k3b were installed too and still did not help. As for the USB power, here I think you might actually be right. I can try running my disks on a laptop with integrated drive to see if there is any difference.

4 hours ago, YamiYukiSenpai said:

Have you tried with Rhythmbox? and for CD ripping, I use K3B

 

Also, run this in case it's not installed:

sudo apt install kubuntu-restricted-addons kubuntu-restricted-extras

 

 

Try and see if you can add a drive and point it to your CD?

 

Note: I also buy and rip CDs, but mainly for artists and bands I love, like Taylor Swift & Eminem

Tried Rhythmbox with no success but will try again just in case. Seems like you'd need to manually "add" music from audio CD to listen to it and that's a bit fussy, ideally I just want to plop a disk into the drive and start listening. Installed the packages you've mentioned, will check the results later today along with creating a drive in Wine, tried that but could not figure it out. Thanks!

 

One more thing to add, I just noticed that the drive starts really acting up if you open the disc in Dolphin. If you just go straight to Audacious and play the spinny boi without even touching the drive in the file manager it seems to work much faster. Kind of makes sense 

[Potatoes2241]

Ok so it seems like the culprit may actually be in Dolphin or KIO. Apparently audio CDs indeed work (so far at least) flawlessly if you just go straight to Audacious (or other player that works) and play the CD. No spindowns, takes reasonable time to read, no stutters and so on. Even ejects when you push the button on the drive door. I think I may just dig around Audacious and try making it auto-start the playback and the matter can be considered sorted.

 

But, if you even touch the disk in Dolphin - all hell breaks loose. It may or may not load the contents of the CD (as wavs, I suppose its some kind of transcoding), it may or may not take minutes to load, it absolutely will prevent Audacious and the others from playing the contents and if you start playing first and then get to Dolphin the audio will get distorted to all hells. Seems like yesterday I have bamboozled myself into thinking that audio playback from CDs is completely broken because I kept trying to open the disk in file manager first and then go to the player app. Welp, the more you know 

 

Thanks everyone for the input! 

[Ralphred]

So, if there is a bug in your audiocd-kio worker you should be able to uninstall it (assuming you get level of control in kubuntu).

Glad you got your tunes back