WorkManThe CD player's headphone jack monitors the output of the CD player directly. It cannot be used to listen to other sounds generated by the computer, and it emits spurious noise between tracks. The general sound quality is tolerable, but not exactly high fidelity.
The volume control knob on the CD player controls the output level on the CD player's headphone jack only. It does not affect the CD player's output level to the computer.
If the CD is not playing, then the right button on the CD player can be used to open or close the drive. Otherwise, this button has no effect.
If there is a CD in the drive, then the left button can be used to either start playing or skip to the beginning of the next track. If the last track is being played, then the left button skips to the beginning of the CD.
There is no way to stop a playing CD with the buttons on the CD player. The label on the right button indicates that it is supposed to do that, but it doesn't. The best you can do is skip to the last track and wait for it to finish.
Enhanced CD's (CD's with content other than audio tracks) cannot be
played by the Ultra-5's CD player.
WorkMan
WorkMan is an application for the Sun Workstation.
WorkMan does two things. First, it provides a full-function control interface for the CD player. Second, it directs the output of the CD player to /dev/audio.
The control interface is fairly intuitive. It accepts the standard X Windows format arguments. You can also set up a database so that CD's and CD tracks can be identified as they are playing. See the workman(1) man page for more information.
The control interface also responds to the left button on the CD player. However, the right button doesn't work whenever WorkMan acknowledges the presence of the CD in the drive.
The sound quaility of these outputs is far superior to that of the CD player's headphone jack. However, it still may not satisfy you if you are a particularly fussy listener. The rear jacks also have the advantage of picking up all sounds sent by the computer to /dev/audio. However, the bell (e.g. ctrl-G sent to a tty) is a separate device, so you should set your windows to flash when they ring the bell if you want to be alerted while using headphones.
The principle difference between these two jacks is that the output level of the bottom "Headphone" jack is louder. In fact, it is quite loud even on the minimum volume setting. However, the bass response of the top "Line Out" jack is very poor, so I normally use the bottom "Headphone" jack as my headphone connection.
If you're using Walkman-type headphones, chances are that the cord is
not long enough to connect the the back of the CPU enclosure and still leave
a usable amount of slack. You can get a 1/8" stereo extension cord from
Fry's for a couple of bucks.
Audio Control
The "Speaker" toggle button controls whether sounds are produced by the speaker inside the CPU enclosure. The "Headphone" and "Line Out" toggle buttons don't appear to do anything. (This could be considered a bug.)
The "Play Volume" control affects the output level of the speaker, the headphone jack, and the line out. However, it has no effect on the output level of the CD player's headphone jack. The "Mute" toggle button overrides the play volume when it is active. The "Balance" control does what you probably expect it to do.
Audio Control can also be used to capture sounds and save them to a file.
When the computer is booted, the speaker is enabled by default. Unless you have a private office, this is probably not what you want. You can avoid this by adding the following lines to your ".openwin-init" file:
|
if [ "`hostname`" = "YourHostName" ] then /home/anders/bin/speaker_off fi |