Rhythmbox can also play Internet radio stations. The easiest way to do this is to find a streaming radio station (look for Shoutcast PLS files, usually with a.plsextension). Save the PLS file, and then double-click the file in the Nautilus file browser. Nautilus comes configured to launch Rhythmbox for playing audio. Figure 20-4 shows Rhythmbox with a variety of Internet radio stations.
TIP
The site www·di.fm lists a number of free Internet radio channels.
Playing Music with the XMMS Multimedia Player
The XMMS (X Multimedia System) multimedia player provides a graphical interface for playing music files in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and other audio formats. XMMS has some nice extras, too, including an equalizer, a playlist editor, and the capability to add more audio plug-ins. One of its greatest attributes is that XMMS is easy to use. If the player looks familiar to you, that's because it is styled after the Windows Winamp program.
NOTE
Red Hat removed all software that does MP3 encoding or decoding because of patent concerns related to the MP3 format. Although the XMMS player was designed to play MP3 files, the XMMS plug-in required to actually decode MP3 is not included. To add MP3 support back into your Red Hat or Fedora distribution, you can get and install an MP3 plug-in. One place to get RPM packages that support MP3 decoding is http://rpm·livna·org. They are also avail- able from other sources, including www·xmms·org and www·gurulabs·com/downloads.html. This issue does not necessarily apply to other Red Hatderived distributions.
Start the XMMS audio player by selecting Sound & Video Audio Player or by typing xmms from a Terminal window. Figure 20-5 shows the XMMS audio player with the associated equalizer (to the left) and the Playlist Editor (to the right).
As noted earlier, you can play several audio file formats. Supported formats include:
MP3 (with added plug-in)
Ogg Vorbis
WAV
AU
CD audio
CIN movies
NOTE
If XMMS is not able to find a configured sound card, it redirects its output to the Disk Writer plug-in. This causes the files you play to be written to hard disk as WAV files.