Take the CD player to the nth dimension.
Both utilities transform your computer's CD or DVD drive into a stereo CD player, allowing you to play music CDs on your computer. Moreover, they also work as a CD ripper which allows you to extract full-quality digital audio data from your CDs and play them real time, save them to files or pipe them to other utilities for processing. Many file formats are supported, including WAV, AU, AIFF, MP3, AAC, MP4, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.
Xmcd is designed to be attractive, feature-rich yet intuitive to use, and takes advantage of many CD drive capabilities that are not accessible via other software. Unlike other general media players that tries to do it all, xmcd focuses on the CD, and strives to be the best with this medium.
Xmcd supports CD recognition via Gracenote CDDB®. It can connect to the CDDB servers on the Internet to get the artist, disc title, song titles and other information about the CD you're playing. Xmcd uses the enhanced CDDB² service on some platforms to provide even richer content. The CDDB concept, originally pioneered for xmcd, is now the de facto standard source for online music information. Xmcd works with many firewall proxy configurations for CDDB server access. Moreover, xmcd supports CD-TEXT on drives that has this capability.
Xmcd contains "wwwWarp", a portal to the web browser that offers search and dynamic content capabilities based on the CD you're listening to. "Local Discography" is a sub-feature of wwwWarp, and provides a browser-based means of navigating and maintaining your CD collection, sound files, and other related data. There is also a feature-specific help and documentation system, command-line control, remote control, plus much more!
Xmcd has the most extensive platform support of any CD player and ripper software. It runs on virtually all Linux and UNIX OS flavors, as well as OpenVMS. A vast spectrum of CD drive brand/models are supported, including multi-disc CD changers and older SCSI-1 drives.
See screen-shots of xmcd in action. Also, read this rawmeat.org CD players review for UNIX and Linux. Note that it covered xmcd version 2.4. There has been many major enhancements to xmcd since then.
Xmcd is FREE, Open Source software. It is released with the freedom provided to you under the GNU General Public License.
Guided by a philosophy of "maximum functionality with minimum flash", xmcd has been enhanced and refined continuously since 1993, and each release is backed by an extensive alpha and beta test program. It is robust, reliable, secure, and is being enjoyed by thousands of users on a daily basis.
Xmcd has been included on CD-ROMs from Compaq/Digital, Hewlett Packard, Red Hat, SuSE, Walnut Creek, InfoMagic, SCO Skunkware, SGI, Sun, Tams, and others. Download the latest version (source code and/or pre-compiled binaries), and give it a spin!