Playing an audio file on Ubuntu with MPlayer

MPlayer can play many many types of audio and video files.  

Accessing the toolbar 

Accessing the controls for MPlayer on Linux (Ubuntu) is maybe a little different than many other softwares you may have used. The first thing you might notice is that there is no tool bar for selecting options.

The way to access the functions is to right-click on the video window :

You can access all the functions of MPlayer this way. You can also right-click on the interface (below the video window) for the same effect.

To open an audio file its a simple matter of right clicking on the video window and selecting Open...

Now move your mouse to the right and choose Play file...

Now release your mouse button and you should see a dialog like this infront of you:

There are three parts to this window. The top section shows you the directory you are in now:

In this case I am in the directory 'floss' (my home directory). The second part of the window shows what is in the current directory now:

You will see something similar (but of course showing you the files and directories in your computer). For the sake of this explanation lets call this part the 'navigation window'. You can click around in this window, open directories etc. If you want to open a directory then just double click on one of the directories, and if you want to go up a directory double click on the '..'

There is no damage to your files you can do by browsing this way so practice saway.

Lastly we see a drop down box that tells us what kinds of files we are looking for:

If you click on the arrow on the far right you will see more options listed :

This list in itself can be a bit overwhelming. If you didn't know it, there are many many ways in which audio and video is stored in files. Each unique method is called a 'file format' or 'file type'. What you see here is a list of every possible audio and video file type that MPlayer can play. The important thing here is not to freak out at the crazy amount of options, but you should probably know what kind of file it is you want to play. Lets pretend we have already made that decision and we want to play an MP3 file. Then we simply select this with our mouse:

Now release the mouse button and your choice should be highlighted in the window:

Now, for the purposes of this explanation, I have already placed a few MP3 files in the directory we are currently looking at. The thing to highlight here, is that once we have selected the file types we want to open, if there are any in the directory we are currently viewing then these files miraculously appear :

These files weren't visible before because we had not told MPlayer that we were looking for MP3 files. Once we have done that then it shows all the MP3 files to us. It means we don't have to look through huge lists of files looking for any which end with '.mp3'. We simply tell MPlayer to sort that out for us and them we choose which one we want to hear.

To listen to one of these files just double click on them and the player should start playing it:

You will notice that if you have selected an  audio file to play the video window disappears. Thats normal. If you had chosen a video file it would have stayed there and the video would be replayed.