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My Rhythmbox won't play (or even list) some of my .wav files. The ones I tried are taken from more recent CDs (one was from 2013). A screen message was displayed saying I need a "demuxer" to play those files but it was unable to find software for this. Is there a way to fix this or another Ubuntu audio player which can play .wav files from all CDs?

Here are the errors:

"Unable to play file. Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) demuxer is required to play the file, but is not installed. (Cancel/Find In Ubuntu Software)"

and:

"Unable to Find Requested Software"

The .wav files are on my PC hard drive but are directly from original retail purchased CDs. The pattern seems to be files taken from CDs I purchased in about the last four years, regardless of the original release date of the music. E.g. I can play the track "Broken Leg" by Bluejuice, which was released in 2009, but not the track "Survivor", by Destiny's Child, which was released in 2001 but which I purchased in 2019.

Allan
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2 Answers2

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Rhythmbox uses gstreamer to play music. The ASF demuxer is provided by the gstreamer "ugly" plugins.

First, run the following commands to enable the universe and multiverse repositories:

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo add-apt-repository multiverse

Next, run the following commands to install the ASF demuxer and the restricted extras package:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
mchid
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The .wav files are on my PC hard drive but are directly from original retail purchased CDs. The pattern seems to be files taken from CDs I purchased in about the last four years, regardless of the original release date of the music. E.g. I can play the track "Broken Leg" by Bluejuice, which was released in 2009, but not the track "Survivor", by Destiny's Child, which was released in 2001 but which I purchased in 2019.

It's not WAV files. It's ASF files. That's a lossy Microsoft format for music.

The CD probably containted two parts: One audio part, and one data-part with a lossy version of the music stored for playback. This also fits with the fact that it applies to some CD's, but not all.

When it's a pure Music CD, you actually copy the PCM audio when you drag it from the CD to your disk. When it's a data and music CD, you only copy the datafiles.

I would look into ripping the CD in a proper way so that you get the actual PCM data from all CD's, not the inferior lossy files, that may be encumbered by DRM.

vidarlo
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