46. Audio Station and Video Player¶
Audio Station¶
The Audio Station looks like a stereo of the 1990s: a rack of devices, one above the other, in the colours of your desktop. It plays audio CDs, music files and internet radio, and records radio.
Start it from the Sound & Video drawer, or with amade-audio.
The window has no frame of its own: its top rack is the title bar. Drag it to move the window. The buttons in the top rack, Mixer, CD, Player and Web Radio, show or hide the racks. Pressing Play on one device stops the others.
| Rack | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mixer | A fader for each device, the microphone, the output (speakers, headphones, HDMI), bass and treble, and the master volume. Mute silences everything. |
| CD | Plays audio CDs. The titles come from the CD itself or from the free MusicBrainz database, the cover from the Cover Art Archive; a CD it knows needs no network. Edit Titles… names the tracks by hand. |
| Player | Plays MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, FLAC, WAV, AIFF and MIDI files. Drop files or folders on the list below the racks. |
| Web Radio | Thousands of internet radio stations from radio-browser.info: search by name, genre or country, keep your favourites. Stations… opens the list. |
Below the racks, the list shows the playlist, the tracks of the CD or the stations, with a large cover beside it.
Recording the radio¶
Press ● while a station plays, and again to stop. The recording goes to ~/Music/Radio/<station>/, as the station sends it, without losing quality. A right click on ● sets the options, such as a new file for each song. Recordings are for your private use only.
Settings¶
The menu button (☰) opens Settings…: the size of the racks (by default it fits your screen), the colour of the displays, the language, and a proxy if your network needs one.
Video Player¶
The Video Player plays video files, video streams from the internet and DVDs.
Start it from the Sound & Video drawer, by double-clicking a video file, or with amade-video film.mp4.
| What | How |
|---|---|
| A file | File → Open File…: MP4, MKV, WebM, AVI, MOV, MPEG-2 and nearly everything else |
| A stream | File → Open URL…: a video address, HLS (.m3u8) and DASH |
| A DVD | File → Open DVD…, also an .iso image or a VIDEO_TS folder; titles and chapters, without the DVD menus |
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play and pause |
| S | Stop |
| Left / Right | 10 seconds back / forward |
| Page Up / Page Down | Previous / next chapter |
Encrypted DVDs
Most bought DVDs are encrypted. To play them the Video Player needs the library libdvdcss, which amadeOS does not install, because in some countries, Germany among them, getting round copy protection is not allowed. Find out what applies where you live. Home-made DVDs play without it.
Planned
The Video Player is at an early stage. Next come a face in the style of the Audio Station, lists of DVD titles and chapters, recent files, a playlist, audio and subtitle tracks, full screen, the volume, and remembering where you stopped in a file.
Under the hood
The Audio Station plays music in Java itself and reads CDs with libcdio; its settings are in ~/.config/amadeos/audio/, the CD titles and covers in ~/.cache/amadeos/audio/discs/. The Video Player leaves the playing to libmpv, the engine of the mpv player, with FFmpeg and libdvdnav.