Multimedia

SliTaz sound and video

SliTaz LiveCD mode provides sound support, but no video player, however you can watch YouTube by installing the get-flash-plugin package. To watch videos you can use Xine, it supports most formats such as avi, mov, mpeg etc, note Xine can also act as an audio player. At the sound level, you have a mixer (alsamixer) and audio player (alsaplayer), both installed by default on the standard LiveCD. SliTaz also provides tools to configure your sound card.

Configure the sound card

In LiveCD mode SliTaz automatically configures the sound card by launching a dialog. In most cases the sound card is instantly recognized and you just press ENTER to continue to login and have your sound working. However, sometimes your card is not recognized at startup or simply not supported. Before throwing in the towel, you can try to manually configure your card by asking for help on the discussion list or on the hardware support forum.

Soundconf

To configure or reconfigure a sound card, SliTaz provides a script (soundconf), this utility is used at startup and doesn't pose any questions, supports the right modules and automatically configures /etc/rsS.conf so that the right driver is loaded on each start. Soundconf will also automatically adjust volume levels, you can change the settings later through the mixer and alsactl. To start the sound configuration interface, you must have administrator priviledges and type:

 # soundconf

Alsactl

Alsactl controls alsa and can store settings or restore sound for example, to retain preferences for each start. When configuring sound with soundconf, volumes are automatically adjusted. You can use alsamixer as root to change the values and then launch alsactl to store the configuration:

 # alsactl store

To restore the configuration, you can use the alsactl restore command or to restore your preferences at each system startup you can edit /etc/init.d/local.sh with your favorite text editor or simply 'echo' the changes:

 # echo 'alsactl restore' > /etc/init.d/local.sh

Alsamixer

Alsamixer is the official mixer of the Alsa project. It is simple and effective and can be run from the menu or directly from a terminal. The volumes can be regulated with the up/down arrows or muted using the m key. To start from a Linux terminal:

 $ alsamixer

Alsaplayer

The audio player Alsaplayer is designed to be simple, clean and intuitive. Alsaplayer on SliTaz provides support for ogg, mp3 (via libmad) and wav files, playlists and viewers to accompany sound and the ability to adjust pitch and volume. Once launched from the menu just click the play button or load a playlist to start.

Asunder - Audio CD Ripper

Asunder retrieves and encodes audio tracks from a CD. The toolkit is simple and easy to use, encoding songs into wav, ogg or mp3 (via lame package). It can search CDDB, create playlists and edit file names. You will find Asunder in the Multimedia category on the menu.

Xine

Xine is a multimedia project providing various video viewers and audio players. SliTaz provides libraries and a media player contained in the package xine-ui. Xine uses a Xlib interface, a control panel, a right click configuration menu and various plugins. It can play ogg, mp3 and flac audio codecs and mov, avi or mpg video formats. To install xine and its dependancies:

 # tazpkg get-install xine-ui

Official Xine website

mpg123

Mpg123 is a command line audio player and file converter. This means that you can listen to music or convert files from a terminal. To display help, use the --help option. To play a mp3 file, just launch mpg123 followed by the name of the audio file:

 $ mpg123 sound.mp3

Mpg123 can also encode a file into another format, for example you can convert a wav file into a mp3 file. Example:

 $ mpg123 -w sound.mp3 sound.wav 
Copyright © 2008 SliTaz - GNU General Public License;
Documentation is under GNU Free Documentation License and code is valid xHTML 1.0.