Why would Application Sound Be OK, CD Sound Not Available?
 

Hi - There are some similar questions posted about this, but I didn't see any threads that quite deal with this situation. So maybe someone could answer a question for me.

I'm running Red Hat 9.0 (kernel 2.4.20-8) and have a Dell Dimension 2400 PC. This PC has the Intel 82801DB integrated sound chip. The driver being used is the AC'97 driver.
The question I have is:

Why am I able to get sound from various applications like a game, but don't get anything when playing a CD?

My machine has sound outputs in both the back and front. Both of these play sound from a game like Scorched Earth 3D, but neither play sound from a CD (using the XMMS media player or gnome-CD). The CD spins and is definitely recognized as the track and album info is retrieved just fine in gnome-CD. Nothing is muted in gnome-volume-control and all outputs are up fairly high.

Since the sound does work and the syslog looks to be loading the driver fine (see below), I can't figure out why a CD won't play (note that since there is no sound card per say, there are no outputs/wires from the CD driver to an input on a PCI card - I guess everything handled on the system board or something).

Output from dmesg showing driver load success (I think):

i810: Intel ICH4 found at IO 0xedc0 and 0xee00, MEM 0xfeb7fa00 and 0xfeb7f900, IRQ 3
i810: Intel ICH4 mmio at 0xd0f6aa00 and 0xd0f6c900
i810_audio: Primary codec has ID 0
i810_audio: Audio Controller supports 6 channels.
i810_audio: Defaulting to base 2 channel mode.
i810_audio: Resetting connection 0
i810_audio: Connection 0 with codec id 0
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: ADS116 (Unknown)
i810_audio: AC'97 codec 0 supports AMAP, total channels = 2

The "ADS116 (Unkown)" line makes me wonder if the driver load is completely successful.

I'd appreciate any help at all, not that this is a big deal right now, but it's been bugging me for a while.

Thanks alot,

Scott Cook
Chicago, IL

The solution in fact is very simple. Most cd players in linux use analog extraction playback only. I bet if you use a cd player software and then plug your speakers into the jack in the front of your cd rom drive, sound will come out.

Two solutions:

1) Plug cable from back of cdrom drive to your soundcard. Cable should come with cdrom drive.
2) Enable digital extraction playback in cd players software or get a software that supports it. I know that XMMS has an option in the CDAudio plugin that enables digital audio extraction. However I am not sure about your version of XMMS since you use Redhat 9.0 while I use Fedora Core 2. But try it anyway.

Thanks - well, that was simple. Plugging directly into the CD player's front jack worked just fine.

I'll check about setting my player for digital extraction like you suggested too (then I won't have to keep unplugging).

As far as I can tell, there's no way of utilizing the outputs in the back of the CD drive itself unless I pick up a PCI soundcard. With this integrated sound, it doesn't look like there is anyplace to plug into.

Thanks again!

Scott

That worked excatly the same for me, too !!!

Thx, you're great, guy !

Although I don'y know why that works (from the back of the CD-drive in Mandrake<...?)