To Auto-Play Audio CD on Insertion

Symptom:

You've set up dbus and gnome-volume-manager, it mounts data CDs OK, but you insert an audio CD, and nothing happens.

What's happening:

Did you configure gnome-volume-manager with a useable action upon finding an audio CD?

You can sometimes elicit useful information by starting a separate xterm, killing the normal gnome-volume-manager (if any), and executing gnome-volume-manager -n. -n means to not fork as a daemon. It will echo dbus chatter it receives and commands it tries to execute. If a command is not working you may notice a useful error message.

How to fix:

• First, execute gnome-volume-properties and click on the Multimedia tab.

• Mark (click on) the checkbox Play audio CD discs when inserted.

• The player command by default invokes banshee. Is it installed? Working? Liked by you? This is a recent Gnome player, and I prefer to use xmms (which is deprecated because the GUI uses GTK version 1 which is obsolete).

• The correct xmms command line is:

  xmms --play /media/xmms_audio_cd

  See the bugfix above about playing audio CDs: it tells how to open the preference dialog and configure the CD Audio Player. One of the items is a directory. If this directory name is a command line argument, it means to play all tracks on the audio CD (rather than all audio files in the directory). The directory shown is the default, but if you have renamed it, e.g. if you have multiple players, you will need to specify the actual directory when gnome-volume-manager invokes xmms.