Applications

# 5 Applications

Contents of this section

This section briefly lists some of the key applications related to CD-ROM that are available under Linux. Check the Linux Software Map for the latest versions and archive sites.

## 5.1 Audio CD players

Several programs are available for playing audio CDs, either through a headphone jack or an attached sound card.

Workman

  a graphical player running under X11 and supporting a CD database and many other features

WorkBone

  an interactive text-mode player

xcdplayer

  a simple X11 based player

cdplayer

  a very simple command line based player

Xmcd

  an X11/Motif based player

xmitsumi

  another X11 based player for Mitsumi drives

xplaycd

  another X11 based player, bundled with sound mixer and VU meter programs

cdtool

  command line tools for playing audio CDs

Some of these programs are coded to use a specific device file for the CD-ROM (e.g. `/dev/cdrom`). You may be able to pass the correct device name as a parameter, or you can create a symbolic link in the `/dev` directory. If sending the CD output to a sound card, you may wish to use a mixer program to set volume settings or select the CD-ROM input for recording.

## 5.2 Inheriting File System

The Inheriting File System (IFS) is a kernel driver that allows mounting multiple file systems at the same point. It is similar to the Translucent File System provided under SunOS. By mounting a hard disk directory over a CD-ROM file system, you can effectively obtain a writable CD-ROM file system.

The current version is experimental and was written for the 0.99pl11 and pl12 kernels; it may or may not work with more recent revisions. The author is Werner Almesberger (`almesber@bernina.ethz.ch`).

## 5.3 PhotoCD

PhotoCDs use an ISO-9660 file system containing image files in a proprietary format. Not all CD-ROM drives support reading PhotoCDs.

The `hpcdtoppm` program by Hadmut Danisch converts PhotoCD files to the portable pixmap format. It can be obtained from `ftp.gwdg.de:/pub/linux/hpcdtoppm` or as part of the PBM (portable bit map) utilities, available on many archive sites (look for "pbm" or "netpbm").

The `photocd` program by Gerd Knorr `kraxel@cs.tu-berlin.de` can convert PhotoCD images into targa or Windows and OS/2 bitmap files.

The same author has written the program `xpcd`, an X11-based program for handling PhotoCD images. You can select the images with a mouse, preview the image in a small window, and load the image with any of the five possible resolutions. You can also mark a part of the Image and load only the selected part. Look for these packages at `ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de:/pub/linux/Local/misc`.

(I've actually tried a PhotoCD! If anyone wants more detail on how to view files, etc... let me know and I can expand this section).

## 5.4 Mkisofs

Eric Youngdale's `mkisofs` package allows creating an ISO-9660 file system on a hard disk partition. This can then be used to assist in creating and testing CD-ROM file systems before mastering discs.

The tools for actually writing data to writable CD-ROM drives tend to be vendor specific. They also require writing the data with no interruptions, so a multitasking operating system like Linux is not particularly well suited.

## 5.5 9660_u

These are some utilities for verifying the format of ISO-9660 formatted discs; you may find them useful for testing suspect CDs. The package can be found on `ftp.cdrom.com` in the `/pub/ptf` directory. They were written by Bill Siegmund and Rich Morin.

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