Raiden's Realm: The KDE 4.3 System Settings - Part 4

The KDE 4.3 System Settings - Part 4 - Advanced User Settings (Page 1 of 5)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Feb 08, 2010 at 12:53pm
Section: Tutorials
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Welcome to part four of our look at the KDE 4.3 System Settings panel. In this section we'll tackle the Advanced User Settings under the Advanced tab. So let's take a look at what's available in this section and how it may benefit you.

Akonadi

The Akanadi section is a single configuration window with two tabs which, interestingly enough, controls how your personal information is stored, managed and accessed on the system. This really isn't a section that you need to do anything with. More than likely this will be something that system administrators will handle, and the average person need not be bothered with it. Although there are some settings under the Akonadi Resources Configuration tab that will allow you to fine tune how data is saved, and where.

Audio CD's

The Audio CD's section is a rather interesting configuration panel. It allows you to configure how KDE takes the Audiocd IO slave and uses it to rip and encode audio cd's for you via Konqueror. Given the proliferation of MP3 players, and the need to convert your CD collection to MP3's or OGG Vorbis files for listening on your player, this kind of feature is highly needed.

The four option tabs under this section are: General, Names, MP3 Encoder, and Ogg Vorbis Encoder. The General tab allow you to specify the encoding device, error correction, and encoder priority. The Names tab allows you to choose how the encoder will name your files based on their cd information. (this also assumes that you either have A) access to the online cd information database (CDDB), or B) a CD with the track information already embedded in it.

The MP3 Encoder tab allows you to configure the encoding method, special options (Copyright, iso encoding, id3, etc), Filter Settings (for setting up filter and cleanup of ripped tracks) and your bitrate settings. The Ogg Vorbis Encoder tab allows you to chose between Quality or Bitrate based encoding quality, and a quality and bitrate section for adjusting the output quality of your track based on the quality type you want to use. You can also have it include the track information with each file as an ID3v2 tag.

Autostart

The Autostart section, a configuration window all its own, is rather interesting, but also very, very simple. It allows you to add a script, or shortcut, or even a program that you would like to start automatically when KDE loads. Before you had to toss shortcuts into the "Autostart" folder. Now you can do it from here with just a few clicks.

CDDB Retrieval

The CDDB Retrieval section takes the CDDB feature used in the CD ripping section discussed above and allows you to configure how it will work, where it will get its data, and how it will handle submissions back to the database. This section is a stand alone configuration window with two tabs: Lookup and Submit.

The Lookup tab gives you access to two different lookup services: MusicBrainz and FreeDB. You can also tell it where to store the CDDB data as well. The Submit tab allows you to specify what email address you want to make a submission (to the freedb server), and how you want to do it. IE, via HTTP, or by email.