I installed Debian Sarge with kernel 2.6 several days ago.

About sound, I installed alsa-base and alsa-utils packages. I used alsaconf to configure and set volume levels using alsamixer. Then, tested system sounds under KDE. It worked. I also tried to use play command from sox package to play some .wav file, everything seemed to work. However, when I try to insert my music cd into either dvd-rom or cd-rw, it appears to run, but I cannot hear anything no matter how I increased the volume.

I also tried to use Linspire 5.0 live cd (since it is derived from Debian) to play my music cd, and it worked well.

Any suggestion is very much appreciated!

cwh

Do you have the analogue audio cable connecting any of your optical drives to the sound card (or motherboard in the case of integrated audio)? As in the case of most audio applications in Linux, the CD audio is dealt with through just that analogue cable by default.

Check your audio playback applications whether they have support for digital playback or digital audio extraction, and if so, set it to use that as the default setting tends to be analogue CD audio.

At least XMMS and of that derived audio players (e.g. Beep Media Player and Audacious) have that option.
In them: Preferences → Input Plugins → CD Audio Player → Configure → check the Digital audio extraction option.

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