"ONE FLOPPY" AUDIO CD AND MP3 BSD PLAYER

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1FCD BSD je projektom autora týchto stránok, resp. ide o jednodisketovú FreeBSD distribúciu pre okamžité prehrávanie Audio CD a MP3 CD na hociktorom počítači. Pravdaže, ovládač PCM vo FreeBSD nepodporuje všetky zvukové čipy, ale ak máte starší počítač, nebudete si musieť kupovať nejakú Hi-Fi vežu, nebudete potrebovať hard disk a ani monitor. Keďže som už trochu lenivý prekladať do slovenčiny jednoduchý návod a intro, dúfam, že budete vedieť aspoň trochu po anglicky a zvládnete to. Myslím však, že stiahnuť si súbor 1FCDBSD.zip dokáže dnes už hocikto, takisto ho rozbaliť, súbor IMG zapísať na disketu pomocou utility rawrite.exe, ktorá je obsiahnutá v balíku, a spustiť počítač z diskety. Pre prehrávanie Audio CD stačí napísať príkaz "cdc" a potom stlačiť klávesu "P" (play), pre prehrávanie MP3 súborov z CD stačí napísať "mpg-cd". Ak máte CD-ROM umiestnený na inom kanáli, skúste napísať "mpg-cd2", "mpg-cd3", prípadne "mpg-cd4". Všetky súbory z CD sa zapíšu do playlistu a vy budete počuť hudbu. Pre prehranie nasledujúcej kompozície postačí stlačiť klávesy Ctrl+C, pre ukončenie programu stlačte Ctrl+C dvakrát a vymeňte CD.

Probably the first such distro in the world; 1FCD BSD, or One Floppy CD Player, was developed by me (March 2004), because
I realized that an old computer can be used as a simple Audio CD or MP3 player, and I was not satisfied with what I found on the net.
Note: Read this in a graphical environment to see commands in bold!
Download  1FCDBSD.zip

QuickStart:         Boot the 1FCD BSD floppy and put an Audio CD or a CD with MP3 files into a CD-ROM drive                    
Type:                   cdc to play an Audio CD, then press "P" for "Play"
Type:                   mpg-cd
to play all MP3 files from a CD                
Type:                   mpg-cd2, mpg-cd3, or mpg-cd4 if you have more, or special CD-ROMs
Press:                  Ctrl+C to play a next track, press Ctrl+C twice to exit the MP3 player
Type:                   mpg-c
to play all MP3 files from a DOS/Windows (FAT16/FAT32 only) drive
Type:                   cdru to umount a CD from CD-ROM /cdrom dir, then type mpg-cd again to play another CD with MP3 files
Type:                   1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
to mount other DOS/Windows FAT16/FAT32 partitions, then type mpg-1, mpg-2, etc. (to play MP3 files)
Type:                   reboot
to reboot the computer
Type:                   a to mount an MS-DOS floppy filesystem, if you want to copy a playlist to /tmp directory
Type:                   cp /floppy/playlist /tmp to copy the playlist into /tmp directory, the format of a playlist is simple:
                             /cdrom/mp3/mdavis/kind_of_blue.mp3
                             /cdrom/mp3/mdavis/so_what.mp3
Type:                   mpg123 -@ /tmp/playlist to play your favorite songs. The compositions MUST be available on a CD or hard drive
Type:                   umount /cdrom/2
or  umount /cdrom/3  or umount /cdrom/4  to umount other CD's from the system
Alt+F2=               quick help (shell)
Alt+F3=Shell       Type "root" to go into another shell
Alt+F4=Shell       Use for any other useful thing you may think of, type Alt+F5, etc., if you have something more important in your mind      
Because the system resides in memory, you may safely remove the diskette. There are some minimum commands in /sbin directory,
type "ls /sbin" to see these commands.
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If you have an older computer, you can save money. It can serve as a Hi-Fi equipment replacement. Such a Hi-Fi equipment
is quite expensive and with good speakers you may receive quite a cool sound even with an older computer. Normally, if you want to use
a computer as an audio player, you need an operating system, which costs money, and time to install it, which may be costly too, especially
if you are busy. If you use a free Unix clone, you need a hard disk, which is expensive too, and a monitor to install various programs, so that
you could see what you are doing. This is time consuming. Basically, any older computer (Pentium) with a compatible sound card can be
used as an audio player with this diskette. You can remember those 1FCD BSD few commands and put your monitor and harddisk
elsewhere. There are not many such programs, and if, only in Linux versions. Some programs did not work with my sound card,
other Linux one-floppy players, like Osnofian One Floppy MP3 Player, do not support, at least in time of writing this info,  an Audio CD playback,
and I did not find anything comparable to One Floppy Audio or MP3 Player in the BSD world of mini distros. And there are only few such mini
BSD distros.. Because I have quite many Audio CD's and an old Pentium 200 MHz notebook, I found the idea to develop my own version
of a One Floppy Audio CD and MP3 player very useful. But this was not a very easy thing as you might think ;)

Minimal requirements

8 MB RAM
486-DX Processor, (PnP Mainboard ?)
Sound card
compatible with FreeBSD PCM driver
Diskette Drive and CD-ROM


This floppy was tested on a 486-DX computer, on an IBM Thinkpad 390x notebook, and on several standard desktop computers
with AC97 codec, where it played all CD's (MP3's too) without problems.

1FCD BSD floppy includes cd-console 2.4 ncurses Audio CD player http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salerma/cd-console/
and mpg123 console MP3 player http://www.mpg123.de/

How to use


Type dd if=1fcdbsd.img of=/dev/fd0 to write the image to the diskette (Linux, FreeBSD),
use the rawrite.exe utility in the package to write the image from DOS/Windows (Command Prompt Window).

Just insert an Audio CD or a CD with MP3 files on it into a functional CD-ROM drive and boot from this floppy.
Read help above in this document.

Tips

To create a playlist, type the "find" command with various options and  check its man page on the Internet. You can actually exclude some names
of files on a hard disk and make a good playlist, or prepare it elsewhere and copy it from an MS-DOS or BSD floppy.

To mount a FreeBSD filesystem floppy, type: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

To create a playlist, type:
find /cdrom -name \*.mp3 > /tmp/playlist.lst
where the string "*" must be changed by the find option to select only certain file names. The "\" slash is for shell not to
interpret "*" as a regular name, but as a wildcard. Type find /cdrom -name m\*mp3 > /tmp/playlist.lst will - this will create
a playlist in the /tmp directory with MP3 files in all /cdrom (subdirectories too) directory that start with "m" letter.
If you want to append more files (starting with "c" letter) into the playlist, type
find /cdrom -name c\*mp3 >> /tmp/playlist.lst

This is just an example, which you should modify, but it is possible to create playlists by various find options:
find /usr/src -not \( -name "*,v" -o -name ".*,v" \) '{}' \; -print

This command will search in the /usr/src directory and all sub directories. All files that are of the form '*,v' and '.*,v' are excluded. Important
arguments to note are:

How it was prepared

Really difficult. This was actually like building a system from scratch.

Drivers - supported sound cards

The *pcm* driver provides support for PCM audio play and capture.
This driver also supports various PCI and WSS/MSS compatible ISA
sound cards, and AC97 mixer. True full duplex operation is available
on most cards. If your sound card is supported by a bridge driver, *pcm* driver
works in conjunction with the bridge driver.  The driver works best with WSS/MSS
cards, which have a very clean  architecture and an orthogonal set of features. They also happen to
be among the cheapest audio cards on the market.

Below is a list of supported codecs/cards. If your sound
card is not listed here, it may be supported by a bridge driver.
CS4237, CS4236, CS4232, CS4231 (ISA)
All these cards work perfectly in full duplex using the MSS mode.
This chipset is used, among others, on the A/Open AW35 and AW32, on
some Intel motherboards, and (the CS4231) on some non-PnP cards.

The CS4232 is reported as buggy in the Voxware documentation but I
am not sure if this is true. On one of my Intel motherboards,
capture does not work simply because the capture DMA channel is not
wired to the ISA DMA controller.

Yamaha OPL-SAx (ISA)
Works perfectly in all modes. This chip is used in several PnP
cards, but also (in non-PnP mode) on motherboards and laptops (e.g.
the Toshiba Libretto).
OPTi931 (ISA)
The chip is buggy, but the driver has many workarounds to make it
work in full duplex because for some time these were the only full
duplex cards I could find. u-law formats uses U8 format internally
because of a bug in the chip.
Trident 4DWave DX/NX (PCI)
ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370/1371 (PCI)
Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI is supported as well.
ESS Solo-1/1E (PCI)
NeoMagic 256AV/ZX (PCI)

TROBLESHOOTING

The floppy should yield music on any standard FreeBSD PCM driver compatible sound card, but don't forget
to attach a cable from a CD-ROM to the sound card. If you have more CD-ROM drives and
you encounter a problem, try to play music from the script "mpg-cd2", mpg-cd3" or "mpg-cd4".

FreeBSD sometimes mounts DOS partitions with files in upper case, but don't worry about this,  I handled this,
the system will play both MP3 and mp3 files (Unix is case sensitive).

If you have no MP3 files on a hard disk, nothing will happen, you will hear no music.

You cannot mount a Linux partition with this distro, the Linux support is not included in the kernel.

Do not press Ctrl+C in the cd-console (cdc) program. Quit with the "Q" letter, otherwise you will hear
music - which is good, but you will have cd-console playing in the background and you will lose contact with this program.

If you cannot boot, remove the diskette and try a new one. If you cannot boot, then you have a broken
diskette drive (hardware problem).

You may play both Audio CD's and MP3's and mix the music, but I don't recommend this.
Some CD-ROMs do not support multisession CD's, so if your CD does not play,
try first some original CD (not burned), this has probably nothing to do with the system. Some
CD-ROMs do not  support certain types of CD's, this happened to me recently on an IBM Thinkpad
notebook. Try a different CD, or upgrade the firmware. Or, if a CD does not play music,
try ejecting it, cleaning it, closing and trying it again.

If you still do not hear music, try another floppy system similar to this one (1FCD Linux maybe?)
and find out if you have a hardware problem or not. Most probably, there
will be  something wrong either with the CD, CD-ROM or hardware. Or the sound driver
is not compatible with your sound card. Try it on another computer.

Juraj Sipos