Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

13.3 - How can I play audio CDs in OpenBSD?
It is possible to play audio CDs by either having the CD drive play the disc and send analog audio to the 
sound card, or by reading the audio data and sending the digital samples to the sound card over the PCI 
bus. 
To play an audio CD using the analog output of your CD-ROM drive, you can 
●
Use the headphones output, usually at the front side of the drive. 
●
Connect the audio output at the back side to your audio card. Yes, this is a supplementary cable 
next to the data (SCSI/IDE) and power cables. 
A nice command line utility called 
cdio(1)
, has been included in the base system. Called without 
parameters, it will enter interactive mode. If you want to play the CD right away, just enter 
$ cdio play
This will play from the first CD-ROM drive, 
cd0
, by default. Note that the user running cdio should 
have permissions to read the CD-ROM device (e.g. 
/dev/rcd0c
). As this device is only readable by 
root or the operator group by default, for convenience you may want to add the user to the operator 
group by adjusting this group's line in 
/etc/group
. Alternatively, you can modify the file permissions 
of the device as needed. 
Note that you may need to unmute the CD input of the mixer. Just like the outputs, the actual name of 
this input may vary between systems, but you will be using a command like: 
$ mixerctl inputs.cd.mute=off
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq13.html (7 of 25)9/4/2011 10:02:21 AM

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13 - Multimedia
It is also possible that there is no analog audio connection between your CD drive and audio device. In 
this case you could use 
cdio
's 
cdplay
command to send the CD audio data to the sound card through 
the PCI bus. 
$ cdio cdplay
If you prefer a beautiful GUI, there are plenty of X11-based CD players in the packages and ports 
collection. Just have a look in the 
audio
section.