I've already tried my volume settings, but I tried the suggestion above too, and that did not work.

I checked my DMA settings and they were fine, I also did that hdparm command on my CDROM anyway just in case, and that didn't seem to change anything in my DMA settings. I tried ripping to .wav again, and again I get the same results, no sound, but the file size is appropriate (29MB).

Guys,

Try and post a step-by-step solutions for the newbies once it has been found to work!

It worked for me though... great!

Used Yast2 aswell.

1. Yast2 -> Hardware -> IDE DMA Setup
2. Set "Current DMA mode" for my CD-ROM to "On (Default)"

Cheers peeps.

quaff....this may sound a little basic, but if you've done all the volume setting changes in Yast -> H/W -> Sound and verified DMA then....check your speaker sound cable and make sure it plugged into the output jack on your card. I guess one other thing could be that your audio cable from the cd-rom drive to the system board is disconnected too. If those last two suggestions don't fix it then I'm not sure what could be wrong. I guess maybe your sound card isn't supported?

OK, lads and lassies, I had the same problem and found that it was something I did to my grip setup that screwed me. Check the rip setup, and make sure rip is not set to ogg or mp3 unless that's the format on the cd you want to rip. set rip to wav or cda. then check the encode setup and set that to the format you want, ogg or mp3. that should fix the problem.
set rip and encode to the same format only if you are setting them to the format on the cd, and that's the format you want in final output.

I fixed mine with the solution posted earlier regarding the DMA setup, but it's ripping extremely slowly - how can this be sped up - I'm embarressed because all of the "non-Linux" machines I use are ripping a lot faster (It took half a day to rip one CD!).

My DMA options are: Off, On (Default), On (16).

Cheers M'Dears.

DMA should be on. You can verify what your drive is capable of by executing the hdparm command. The options are -i and -I. I forget which one tell you what, but one tells you what your drive is capable of and the other tells you the current setting. You will need to run that command as root.
If that doesn't improve your speed double check what other devices are on that same ide channel. I think that if you have a DMA/16 paired with a DMA/33 that the 33 will be dumbed down to 16.
I use a perl script for ripping that works fairly well. I does seem to have problems with CD's that have data tracks though. It is called MP3Rip and you can find it on http://freshmeat.net You will also need cdparanoia for that script to work. I've also used Kcdrecord which works pretty good too. I can usually do a CD in about 30 minutes. The script makes the .wav first then rips to .mp3