PLAY3401

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

play3401 - play audio CDs through NeXT sound system

SYNOPSIS

play3401 [ -e ] [ -p ] [ -r ] [duration ...]

DESCRIPTION

Play3401 reads the digital audio samples from audio CDs through the SCSI bus and then plays them on the NeXT system itself. Currently play3401 only supports the Toshiba 3401 series of CD-ROM drives.

The audio CD should be inserted only after play3401 has prompted the user for it. Unless the -e option is given play3401 will eject the CD again when it has completed playing.

If you wish to record a standard 16-bit stereo 44.1 kHz soundfile to the standard output specify the -r option. By default playing of the sound is disabled while recording. If you wish to play and record use the -p option as well as the -r option.

The arguments to play3401 are a series of `durations' which are played by play3401 in the order specified. A number of different formats for durations exist.

-: play the entire CD.
-time: play the CD from the beginning until time.
time-: play the CD from time to the end.
time1-time2: play the CD from time1 to time2.
time: play just the specified time.
repeat: start over playing the list of durations from the beginning.

Times may be specified in several different formats down to frame (= 1/75th of a second) accuracy.

#n: The n-th track.
mm: Minute mm of the CD.
mm:ss: Second ss of minute mm of the CD.
mm:ss:ff: Frame ff of second ss of minute mm of the CD.

EXAMPLES

Play the entire CD over and over again.

        play3401 - repeat

Play and record to the file threetracks.snd the tracks 7, 5 and 9 of the CD (in that order) and then stop.

        play3401 -r #7 #5 #9 >threetracks.snd

BUGS

Currently play3401 has only been tested on m68k systems with Toshiba 3401 CD-ROM drives. It is conceivable that it might also work on i386 based system with the proper sound cards. As there is currently no standard SCSI command set to read audio CDs, if play3401 worked on CD-ROM drives different from the Toshiba 3401 that would purely coincidental. The author is very interested in experiences of users with different hardware configurations.

Every time an audio CD is inserted a large number of warning messages will appear on the console. All those messages indicate is that the CD ROM is not in one of the standard data formats which should not come as a surprise.

DIAGNOSTICS

`%s was not installed SUID root': play3401 needs raw access to the CD ROM. On NeXTs this access is only granted to the root user. So to work properly play3401 needs to be run either by root or has to be installed SUID root.

`Can't find Toshiba 3401 CD player -- %s only works with it.': play3401 explicitly checks that the CD ROM drive used is a Toshiba 3401 as sending random non-standard SCSI commands to a different device may have tragic consequences.

`Can't eject CD.': Possibly the drive was installed with the eject prevention jumper installed.

`No free generic SCSI device': play3401 needs to use generic SCSI device of which there are only four. This message indicates that all four of them are being used by other processes.

NOTES

Two points about recording: play3401 writes out the complete unabridged and unmodified sound data from the audio CD which results in sound files more than 10 MBytes/minute in size. If your uses don't require sound of quite so high a quality, you can use sndconvert and sndcompress to significantly reduce the size of the sound files.

Most available audio CDs are copyrighted. Making direct digitial recordings of them for your own use may or may not be a violation of that copyright. Completely copying your favorite CDs to your harddisk and then uploading them to every ftp server in sight is not only almost certainly a violation of that copyright but also the greatest waste of network resources since the creation of misc.activism.progressive.

AUTHOR

Carl Edman <cedman@princeton.edu>, Department of Physics, Princeton University.

Mike Andrews <kramer@fragile.termfrost.org> contributed code to record sounds. Some code for NS/FIP compatibility was incorporated from patches sent by J Daniel Ashton <jdashton@southern.edu>.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 22:08:13 GMT, September 25, 2024