On Thu, 19 Jan 2017 14:41:15 +1300, I wrote:
Set up VLC for him, and was even able to make it the default app that comes up and starts playing when an audio CD is inserted. Just a couple of issues: * For the first few seconds after putting in a disc, playback stutters a little as it seems to be scanning all the tracks to determine their durations. Easy enough to pause playback until this process completes, after which it goes quite smoothly. * Playback order goes by the lexical names it assigns to the tracks, not the actual track order on the disc. Thus, “Track 10.wav” plays before “Track 1.wav”. But he’s not too worried...
Seems the latter irritation, in particular, has become too much to bear. So yesterday I did a further hunt around for alternative audio-CD-playing apps. Found some command-line tools: “cccd”, “cdcd” and “cdtool” (I know, I wasn’t expecting him to type the commands, I was going to wrap them in a double-clickable .desktop file once I was sure they would work). Unfortunately, none of them would do anything: issuing the appropriate play command would simply return without actually starting playback, and no amount of verbose or debug options would show any actual error messages. Then I finally found a GUI-based app called goobox. This plays the tracks in the right order, without trying to rip them. Looks like just the ticket! Only trouble is, Linux Mint refuses to show it in the application menu, or allow it as an option to autolaunch when an audio CD is inserted. So I had to create my own little .desktop file icon for it that he has to manually launch when putting in a CD. I found a file called something like “mimetypes-list” in his user preferences that seemed to be a list of application associations for different media types, and while hand-editing that changed the behaviour so his system now autolaunches Banshee instead of VLC when he inserts a CD (which he then has to dismiss), I couldn’t make it autolaunch goobox instead. Banshee just seems to be the default if there is no custom association. I couldn’t even make it do nothing at all, which would be almost as good. So he always has to first quit the application he doesn’t want, before launching the one he does.