Announce: CDplayer plugin

[bpa]

This is an "official" announce for the CDplayer plugin which has been discussed & tested in the "playing cd's" thread in General Discussion forum

CDplayer plugin enables CDs to be played on the host PC CD/DVD drive through SqueezeCenter.

This plugin is useful for the occasional use of CDs.
- play CDs which are on loan / not owned.
- play CDs which may not warrant ripping and saving (e.g. newspaper freebies, audio books)
- impatience - can't wait to play a new CD

The CD can be played either directly a track at a time using an "URL" (e.g. cdplay://1, cdplay://19 ) or through the CDplayer menu under Extras in which case the FreedB/MusicBrainz databases are checked and if the CD is identified, Album and track details are shown when CD tracks are played.

The plugin uses an application called CDDA2WAV to actually rip audio from the CD. To use CDplayer on your platform you will need a copy of CDDA2WAV. The quality of the rip may be a bit compromised since track has to be played in realtime. The installation of CDplayer plugin is slightly different for Windows, Linux and OSX because CDDA2WAV is an executable.

cdda2wav reference URLs:
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/cdrecord.html
http://www.student.tugraz.at/thomas.plank/

Thanks to Danco for all the help testing the OSX version of CDplayer.

Basic Operation.
Once Installed - there will be a CDplayer menu in Extras on WebUI, SB and SBC. Click on CDplayer menu and you will get 1,2 or more menu items.

There will always be a "CD Tracks - raw format" entry. This menu has an entry for each track - the tracks are numbered. If Album cannot be identified then there will only be the "raw" entry. Occassionally an album will be wrongly identified so user can use "raw" entry to play track without showing incorrect info.

Often (especially using FreeDB) there will be two or more records associated with an Album id - all matching records will be shown.

There is a setting to change operation of Pause to Stop within CDplayer. This is because I am not sure what happens if a playing CD audio stream is paused so I think stop may be better for CD drive.


Windows Installation.
1. Stop SC
2. Download a Zip file from http://homepage.eircom.net/~altondsl...yerWin1v03.zip . This zip file includes necessary executables such as CDDA2WAV.exe
3. Unzip the zipped file into server/Plugins so that you have a server/Plugins/CDplayer
4. You can optionally update socketwrapper which helps minimise stray processes left behind by cdda2wav. Following steps are optional - otherwise go to step 5..
4a.Download and extract sockwetwrapper.exe (v1.11b) from zip at this location http://homepage.eircom.net/~altondsl...rapper111b.zip
4b. Rename existing socketwrapper.exe in C:\Program Files\SqueezeCenter\server\Bin\MSWin32-x86-multi-thread directory so that you can revert if necessary.
4c. copy the downloaded socketwrapper.exe into the C:\Program Files\SqueezeCenter\server\Bin\MSWin32-x86-multi-thread directory
5. Start SqueezeCenter - check in Settings there is a Plugin called CDplayer and in Advanced/FileTypes there should be "CD Player" entries enabled to use cdda2wav.
6. In Settings/Plugins/CDplayer/Settings - if you have more than one CD/DVD drive - you can select the drive to be used. There is a setting to get Album data from FreeDB, MusicBrainz or do not use any database.
7. Put CD in drive and test using either CDplayer menu under Extras or play "cdplay://1" using Tune-in.


Linux Installation.
1. Stop SC
2. Download the CDplayerLinux1v03.tar.gz file attached to this post.
3. Install cdda2wav from the repository for your distro.
4. Untar the tar.gz file into server/Plugins such that you have a directory server/Plugins/CDplayer. Change ownership and permissions of the files to suit your systems.
5. Start SqueezeCenter - check in Settings there is a Plugin called CDplayer and in Advanced/FileTypes there should be entries "CD Player" enabled to use cdda2wav.
6. In Settings/Plugins/CDplayer/Settings - if you have more than one CD/DVD drive - you should define the drive to be used - by default /dev/cdrom is used. There is a setting to get Album data from FreeDB, MusicBrainz or do not use any database.
7. Put CD in drive and test using either CDplayer menu under Extras or play "cdplay://1" using Tune-in.

OSX Installation
As I don't have a Mac, the OSX installation instructions and installation can be considered to be beta and may need some correction/updates. So here is the first draft.

1. Stop SC
2. Download the CDplayerOSX1v03.tar.gz file attached to this post.
3. Install cdda2wav from an OSX repository and make sure it is on the path (e.g. install into /use/local/bin)
4. Untar the tar.gz file into ~/Library/Application Support/SqueezeCenter/Plugins. This folder may need to be created. After untarring the file, you have a directory ~/Library/Application Support/SqueezeCenter/Plugins. You should change ownership and permissions of the files to suit. Make sure the CDplayer/Bin/cdda2wavosx.sh file is executable
5. Start SqueezeCenter - check in Settings there is a Plugin called CDplayer and in Advanced/FileTypes there should be entries for "CD Player" enabled to use cdda2wav.
6. In Settings/Plugins/CDplayer/Settings - if you have more than one CD/DVD drive - you should select the drive to be used - it may be trial and error. There is a setting to get Album data from FreeDB, MusicBrainz or do not use any database.
7. Put CD in drive and test using either CDplayer menu under Extras or play "cdplay://1" using Tune-in.

If you have more than one CD/DVD drive then there is one other configuration issues that may need to be set. If CDs do not play - then you make have to modify the "diskutil" command in Bin/cdda2wavosx.sh. Normally /dev/disk1 is correct. Use a "Mount" command in a Terminal window to find out what "drive" corresponds to your CD/DVD drive.

edit: The attachments below are out of date - install files for versions of SC up to 7.2.x can be found here http://code.google.com/p/cdplayer/downloads/list. For 7.3 and later see post 113 ( http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpo...&postcount=113 ).

Edit: OSX attachment has been updated so that changing diskutil command should not be necessary. However there may still be issues - any feedback would be very useful.

[pippin]

This is cool. Hope I find a bit of time to test it soon, turns out only one of my machines has a CD drive left ;-)

Is there ANY chance to use the ripped data to encode to mp3 and add the cd to the library while playing?

[bpa]

Is there ANY chance to use the ripped data to encode to mp3 and add the cd to the library while playing?

Unlikely as it make the plugin quite complicated especially as playing a track has to be done in realtime and allowing read errors whereas ripping usually performs re-reads to minimise errors.

This plugin was intent to a "companion" to the CDimport plugin which is discussed in this thread.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=42564

CDimport plugin can import now but more work is needed to allow users to customise Album, track, tag and art info as well as choose compression format and filenaming.

[pippin]

Yes, I'm aware of that one, I just feel it's somewhat "wrong" that you have to re-rip the same CD when you "really" want it. It was already on my wish list for CDimport to be able to start playing the imported tracks after ripping of the first one is finished, that would somehow be the "optimum" solution for me.
But I recognize this has it's challenges so this is probably a good alternative...
As I said: will try it ASAP.

[danco]

Just downloaded the Mac version. Will report when I have had time to try it.

Another use for this plugin.

I still use physical CDs for my main system. But very occasionally I want to listen in another room where I have a second SB. The plugin is useful then.

[danco]

Unfortunately I was wrong in suggesting that the DVD/CD drive on my Mac would always be disk1. Today it shows up as disk2, with the result that I got an error message when trying to play the CD.

The result of performing the 'mount' command with no parameters was

dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/Windows (ntfs, local, read-only, noowners)
http://local.JungleDisk.com:2667/JungleDisk/ on /Volumes/JungleDisk (webdav, nodev, noexec, nosuid, mounted by danco)
/dev/disk1s3 on /Volumes/Leopard Duplicate (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)
/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/Wells (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)
/dev/disk2 on /Volumes/Audio CD (cddafs, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners)

This, of course, was with an unplayed CD, so the name was Audio CD. If it had been played, either via the plugin or via iTunes, the name would change to the retrieved name.

I don't know if you could issue a mount command, look for a line containing cddafs, and then pick up the disk number from the start of that line.

Another possibility, though that might not be safe, would be to go through all numbers until it reached one where a CD was recognised.

[bpa]

I don't know if you could issue a mount command, look for a line containing cddafs, and then pick up the disk number from the start of that line.

I can do that - I already do something similar for Windows to find all the possible CD devices amongst the other storage (incl disk / pendrives) devices. Can you post a log of an example use of the command and the output.

[Ramage]

I can't get the plugin to see the cdrom on ubuntu Hardy AMD64. The cdrom loads onto the desktop and tracks can be played using juicer or other app.

Any ideas on how to get the plugin to see the cdrom?

BTW the cdd2wav app in Hardy is contained in "icedax", I assune this will work OK with the plugin (if only I could get the cdrom recognised.

[bpa]

On many Linux system /dev/cdrom is setup linked to the real CDROM device - on my system /dev/hda. Check out your /dev and disk type devices.

cdda2wav is a command line app but there are many graphical front ends for it. I presume icedax is a front end which bundles in cdda2wav.

[danco]

I can do that - I already do something similar for Windows to find all the possible CD devices amongst the other storage (incl disk / pendrives) devices. Can you post a log of an example use of the command and the output.

But I thought I just did! What more do you need?

The text I gave in my earlier post is what is returned when I enter

mount

at the command line.

I have an internal drive with two partitions and an external drive with two partitions also turned on. Hence the disk0s2, disk0s3, disk1s2, disk1s3 in that post.

Entering 'mount" with no parameters simply lists the mounted devices.