Jcd, a Java-AWT audio CD player

Jcd was an experiment to see if Java could be used for something more than simple applets. I chose to write a CD player because it required: interfacing to C, controlling hardware, threads, file IO, sockets, text parsing, image manipulation, data entry, graphical user interfaces. A great project for trying out a new language.

This is an application, not an applet, ie it accesses files and devices and can't be run under Netscape. You must use something that runs a Java application: eg Sun's JDK. If you've managed to get the AWT to run, you shouldn't have any trouble installing and running jcd.

Features:

Play/Stop/Pause/Prev/Next/Eject/Volume control panel.
Track/Index direct access by entry into the numeric display.
Displays track, index, num-tracks, track-time/track-remaining/disc-rem'ing.
Program play, continuous/single play, shuffle play.
Xmcd CDDB artist/disc/track title lookup and display.
- Xmcd CDDB database format and protocols courtesy of Ti Kan and Steve Scherf ( http://www.cddb.com).
- Optional remote CDDB server lookup.
- Autosave of remote lookups to local cache.
- GUI window for creating/editing artist/title/track local cache entries.
Icon button widget - e.g. play button, pause button light up when active.

Jcd is available from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound/cdrom

I've written up a simplified version of Jcd in a two part article for Linux Gazette: