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### software CD player does not play thru speakers (Linux RH 9, Dell Dimension 2350)

From Ted Kubaska

Answered By: Thomas Adam, Jason Creighton

I'm having some difficulty getting my CD player to play through my speakers. I have a Dell Dimension 2350 running Red Hat 9. I got this Red Hat 9 by downloading the ISOs from the Red Hat site. When I bring up the saw CD player, the screen comes up, I can see the elapsed time tick by, but there is no sound coming from my speakers. I can plug into the headphone jack on the CD drive and get sound.

> [Jason] The problem is probably the fact that there's actually two ways to play CDs. One way is for the software to just tell the CD drive to start playing: The sound will play in the little jack on every CD drive in existance that nobody ever uses anyway. There's also supposed to be a cable running from the CD drive to the soundcard inside a computer, which is how things work normally.

> [Thomas] While this is true, this is only applicable if you're using a CD-Player that extracts sound using analog. While most do, Windows applications don't (Media-Player being an example). For the case of laptops, sound is extracted using raw audio.

> [Jason] So the sound never actually gets to the software. And in this case, the sound never actually gets to the sound card because a connection is obviously missing on your laptop.

> The other way to play CDs is read the CD "raw" and then just send the sound to the sound card.

> Some software tries to do it one way, some the other.

> Try this:

>     $ play -t cdr /dev/hdc

> [Thomas] In more recent versions of play(1), if you're using ALSA, you must tell it so.

> [Jason] where `/dev/hdc` is whatever your CD-ROM drive happens to be.

Thanks. Jason's explanation of the two ways to play CDs clears up a lot of confusion. I have succeeded in getting my CD to play thru my speakers (with xmms, not the CD player that comes up with RED Hat -> Sound & Video -> CD Player).

I have not yet taken the skins off of my Dell Dimension 2350 (this is not a laptop as some thought, but Dell's low end tower, a 2 GHz P4) but will do so after the mail I got. Just to check the cable people have referred to. From what I read so far I think my sound card is integrated on my motherboard and not actually a separate card. The RedHat Hardware browser says 82801DB AC'97 Audio, Mfg Intel, Driver i810_audio.

> [Thomas] i810_audio is courtesy of Intel and probably at the time this was written was still quite new. It's certainly not the best soundcard out there (or should I say embedded chip) but it does the job quite well.

I issued a play -t cdr `/dev/cdrom` and a play -t `/mnt/cdrom` and got no response at all.

> [Thomas] This is because "`/mnt/cdrom`" in this context doesn't point to anything. One does not mount audio CDs and so the actual device (`/dev/cdrom`) must be used.

I was pointed to an earlier TAG discussion

http://linuxgazette.net/issue80/tag/4.html

From the information there I downloaded xmms-cdread-0.14a.tar.gz from ftp://mud.stack.nl/pub/OuterSpace/willem, unzipped, untarred, built and installed. I am now listening to CD output thru my speakers!

> [Thomas] This method is still using audio-extraction which often makes the CD-ROM drive spin around very fast. This can be quite noisy, especially on laptops.

All is not perfect, however. If I put in a new CD, the default CD player starts up automatically. This player does not work and never has. I have clicked on preferences for this player (the knife and fork icon) in an attempt to not have it load automatically. I specified no action on CD

> [Thomas] You don't say what window/desktop manager you're using, but if I recall correctly. RH9 uses GNOME as the default desktop manager. It's possible that the settings were/are not saved until you logged out...

load; but it still comes up and tries to play when I load a new CD. I see the elapsed time tick by and get no sound thru the speakers. I have to kill this player and bring up xmms, click on play, and then all is well.

> [Thomas] This comes back to what Jason and I said earlier about how audio is extracted. Since XMMS defaults to using Raw audio, and other players use analog, without the use of such a cable, you just won't hear any sound.

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Published in issue 104 of Linux Gazette July 2004

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