Unique Media Challenge my 7 year old grandson

[allen76693]

I introduced my grandson to Linux Ubuntu 10.04. I know nothing about music CD's so I lay it out for anyone who cares to answer call.
Obviously he could not figure out how to load them to a player to play without CD. So he has a partitioned drive with a fat 32 storage and he has his music there. So he can play what he wants when he wants it. Problem is his storage partition is running out of room so he needs to convert them to mp3 and either save them back to storage or makes more sense to save them to available player on 10.04. Any thoughts for this young Ubuntu enthusiast. Thanks from a grandfather older then dirt

[JRV]

There is a program called "Sound Converter" available in the software center.

It can convert the files to mp3, ogg, or flac.

[allen76693]

He figured that out, but how to get the mp3 converted tracks either back to his storage or to a player

[mikewhatever]

You just copy/paste them. As for the player, Rhythmbox has Music->Import File/Folder in the menu, just tell it where the files are.

[allen76693]

Thanks so much for the info

[SeijiSensei]

Your grandson sounds flexible and competent enough that I'll suggest switching to KDE either by installing "kubuntu-desktop" or, better, installing Kubuntu 12.04.1 (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/12.04.1/release/).

KDE has very nice features (so-called kio-slaves) for dealing with CDs and music formats. If you insert a CD, for instance, KDE will open a file browser window that presents you with views of the tracks in all the formats the machine has support for like FLAC, Ogg, and MP3 (if you have installed kubuntu-restricted-extras). You can then just drag and drop individual songs from the appropriate folder to the storage location, and KDE will convert them automatically. There are also obvious options to rip the entire CD in one go.

I also like Clementine (http://www.clementine-player.org/) as a music player. It has nice features to manage your music library without a lot of overkill. It's available in the repositories and can be installed in regular Ubuntu as well with "sudo apt-get install clementine". There is also a Windows version available which my daughter uses and one for Mac OSX.

I'll add a suggestion for my favorite video player, SMPlayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/), which is also available from the Ubuntu repositories and has a Windows version as well.

[allen76693]

That does sound like something he might pursue to his advantage. When I introduced him to Linux I also introduced him to gnome and perhaps limited him in his thinking. I do appreciate this option which from your description seems to be a sound alternative. Thank you