Playing Music

If you don’t listen to music on your computer you can skip this post. Now that we have covered that I would like to talk about playing music. If you are new to linux you will soon find out that your .mp3 files just won’t work. Don’t fret though there is a solution. There is a program called Sound Converter. Sound Converter does exactly what the name says, it converts music files from many different formats to another format. For example you could convert mp3 to FLAC, or .wav to Ogg Vorbis also known as just Ogg.

There are many reasons for doing this, and I am sure that you will find many more than I know. The main reason that I have mentioned is that .mp3 files won’t play on linux natively. Another reason is that you will save a lot of space by converting your music files.

Before you jump right into it you will need to install Sound Converter. There are a couple of ways to do it. You can install it from a Terminal/Konsole. If you have Ubuntu or a Debian based system you can install Sound Converter by tying: sudo apt-get install soundconverter

If you have a distribution that runs on .rpm files, such as Fedora then you can type: su -c 'yum install soundconverter'

However if you don’t feel comfortable with typing commands, don’t worry you will learn in time. Yet you still need to install Sound Converter. To do this you need to open your Add/Remove Programs. To do this in Ubuntu, go to Applications, then click on System Tools, from there choose Add/Remove Programs. If you are using Fedora, go to System, then click on Administration, and choose Add/Remove Programs. Once Add/Remove Programs is open do a search for “soundconverter” without the quotes, find the package put and check-mark in the box next to it.

Once you get Sound Converter installed open it up and you will see: This is the main screen for Sound Converter. From here you do everything.

The first think that you need to do is to find out what type of file format you are converting to. To do this you will want to go to the Preferences. To get there you will go to the Edit menu, and choose Preferences. The menu that you will see is this: There are a lot of options in there so I will let you play with them to get it set to what you want. The main things you will want to look at are where you are saving the music to, and what format you are saving them in.

Once you have all your setting correct you will want to add some songs or a folder with songs into Sound Converter. To do this you click on the Add File, or Add Folder buttons at the top. For this I am going to be using a song by the band Muse, called Uprising. After you have all your songs ready to go you just have to click on the Convert button..

Now you have music that is converted to a format that you can play with any of the music players that come with your distribution of linux. I hope that you go out and try this with at least some of your music to make sure that it will work. If you find that it does then you can convert all your music over.

If you have any questions for me about this process or if you have any problems with the install process please leave a comment or shoot me a message and I will try my best to help you.

Cheers!

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I am back

Ok so I am back!! I have been away for a long time. I left the linux world for a little while. But I am back I hope that I can keep up with making weekly posts about all the things that a new linux user would want to know. I will be working on a post for all of you that want to listen to your music on your computer but you realize that mp3 files aren’t natively.

So again I am back and I will be here now and hopefully for a long time.

Hello and welcome to Linux!

Welcome!! This is my first post here on my new blog. To tell you a little about myself, I am a Fedora Ambassador. I am also a Bug Zapper.  I love all things Linux, and open source. I feel that there isn’t a need to have software that is closed by the company that makes it. I feel that everyone should be able to fix and change the programs that they are running.

To give you a sense of what this blog is going to be about, I hope to stick to the idea that Linux isn’t just for Nerds and Techies. Linux is the the average person and for the older folks as well. I will try to come up with some things that the average user can do. I might have some posts that run have some topics that are a little harder but I will try to keep it simple. Since I do a lot of stuff with Fedora you should expect that most of my information will be on fedora, and similar RPM run Linux distributions.

If there are any topics that you would like discussed feel free to leave me a comment and I will try to write a post on it. I may not get to an idea right away as I have to do a little research before I write a post, so that I can make sure that it makes sense and all the steps work.

So until next time which won’t be too long. Welcome and Enjoy!!