This is a continuation of the previous node, posted as a new node so people will actually see it (as the old one has dropped off newest node.) Anyways.

From my last node, i received a lot of responses detailing how i could interface with winamp. While this would probably work very nicely, during my researches i found mpg123 (and now having a version that works) i've become slightly obsessed with just using a simple command line program to play mp3s, one that would 'waste' all the resources that using winamp would entail. My first idea was that i could make a primitive stop/start system just by calling mpg123 with the name of the song, then killing the process when i want it to stop. However, the process will not die when i manually start it in the background (mpg123 /mp3/X.mp3 &), then any attempt to call kill on its process id meets with utter failure. However, when i start it in 'foreground' mode (Without the apersand) then pressing ctrl-c will kill it nicely. Which leads me to

Question one: Is there anyway i could easily start/stop a process from perl?

However after my attempts of that nature failed, i hit upon the idea of attempting to just feed the mp3 player via stdin. However, then i hit a new snag, namely perl will not print an mp3 file. Every attempt to read a mp3 file and print it, either to a file or to the console or whatever, has met with complete and utter failure. In a response to my previous node, someone mentioned something about control charcters in the mp3 file. Which is thus

Question two: Is there anyway to convince perl to read/write mp3 files without dying horribly?

In reply to Mp3 PLayer. Part Two! by BUU

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