Okay, don't mount your CD-ROM with an audio CD in it. Open up XMMS and then open your play list. Go to the /mnt/cdrom directory. It might take a few minutes to open up (my XMMS is kind of sketchy too, but it does work). If it doesn't show the tracks listed, click on the "select all tracks" button--I think that's what it's called; I'm not on my Linux box right now, sorry. This should load all the tracks off your CD.

If this doesn't work, you might want to try using another player. Is your CD-ROM a SCSI CD-ROM or an IDE CD-ROM?

Hey if you ever see BigJohn around the forums, point him towards this thread. Me and him had a great 50+ post thread about this

Anyway, here's some suggestions:

Do you have an audio cable (not ide) connected from the CDROM drive to the soundcard? You will need that to play audio CD's in linux.

We aren't going to worry about getting sound working, because it is. However, your cdrom mixer control might be muted. Open up kmix either by typing that into a terminal (konsole was described earlier, go ahead and use that) or by going to run and typing "kmix" without the quotes.

Now, check all the mixer controls, specifically the cdrom ones.

If you are interested, and have the time, here's a link to that thread I was talking about earlier:http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=26095

Good Luck

Cool

I completely forgot about the audio cable. Good suggestion! The volume controls is a good one too. I would've never thought to suggest that. A friend of mine couldn't get his CD to play using XMMS in RedHat about 5 months ago and he found out it was his XMMS volume that was set to 0. Thanks for making me remember to suggest that next time.

You guys were all doing a great job, so I figured I would just mention the easy ones

Cool

Thanks for the answers....I must be getting somewhere because I actually understand what you-all are saying. But alas still no tracks are displayed on any of the cd drives or on any of the applications that play or rip cd's.
Cables are all connected and I can play a cd using the play button on the front panel of the cd device itself ...and kmix does have the cd volume up, in fact i use it to adjust the volume while "manually" playing cd's. If I type cdplay in a terminal I get the repeating message "readtochdr: Input/output error"
Also I noticed on bootup wherer you get the [Ok} as it loads all the parameters I get a [FAILED] on something about loading local filesytems..input/output ....
Is there a way to print or copy this string? Does this have anything to do with playing cd's? Is it even important?
Thanks
Willie








C

When I ask 3 or more questions in a row, I usually follow it with "Is anybody listening to me?"

Anyway, to take a look at that file, look into /var/log/messages or dmesg (both accessible from a terminal). dmesg is done by just typing that. To read /var/log/messages use 'less'. So:
less /var/log/messages
will bring it up and you can scroll up and down.

It probably doesn't have much to do with the CD's.

Another shot:
maybe you are missing the symlink to the correct drive. For now, just take that for what it's worth, now follow this:
Figure out which drive is your actual CDROM device:
Primary Master = /dev/hda
Primary Slave = /dev/hdb
Secondary Master = /dev/hdc
Secondary Slave = /dev/hdd

Now if you are using scsi-emulation (post up your /etc/lilo.conf file so we can see) then the drive might be:
/dev/scd0
OR
/dev/scd1

Looking at your fstab, I'm venturing a guess at /dev/scd0... SO:
as root, in your konsole type:
ln -sf /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom

And now, once again, try to play your CD's in one of the cd players (let's try to all use the same app, just for troubleshooting sakes for now, so please try grip first).

Cool

MasterC
Thanks for your prompt reply. I will get to the trouble shooting a little later, right now I have to do some actual work on this machine! Also in my poking around: control center->system->services->alsa->start->...mesage box says ALSA driver is not running. Would this have anything to do with it? (only one ? this time for you Aggies out there)
thanks

Well, it could. If you'd like go ahead and start it. But if you are getting sound now, then you are probably going to be fine without starting it. However, if you want to use ALSA, go right ahead, it's a great piece of software.

Cool

I'll start this off by saying WTF!! I tried to access: /var/log/messages and permission was denied even tho I was logged on as root. Also ln -sf /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom came up as invalid so I tried ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom and it said file already exists. Also could not find /etc/lilo.conf.
Now for some good (?) news while moving my audio cd between drives i finally see a listing of trackes in Grip...this is /dev/cdrom1 listed (my cdrw and is also scd0)
I still do not have tracks displayed in other devices and my other cd will not display tracks yet.
Progress i think...you can sure piss away alot of time on this...
later

I had a longer post, but by the time I hit "submit reply" I was no longer logged in and lost it all. I'll sum up and be more to the point this time.

Firstly, the first time I tried to access /var/log/messages I tried it by typing "cd /var/log/messages" and got an error. I then realized that "messages" is just a file under /var/log.

Go to command line and type:

cat /var/log/messages

to print the contents to the screen. Hold SHIFT and press PageUp or PageDown to scroll up and down if it doesn't all fit on your screen.

Now, on to your CD-ROM issues Again, in command line type the following:

ls -l /dev/cdrom

to see what exactly /dev/cdrom is pointing to. It will also list the permissions of it.

Now that we've got that down, we can move to the next step. I was reading through the thread again and noticed you had posted your /etc/fstab and found the following interesting:

[/quote]none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,ro,umask=0 0 0[/quote]

You have an IDE CD-ROM and a scsi one. Your IDE is located as a secondary slave. Which one are you putting the audio CD into? If you're putting it into the SCSI drive, then when you open your media player (for the sake of argument we'll say XMMS), you need to open a play list from the /mnt/cdrom directory. However, if you're putting into your IDE drive, you need to go open a play list from the /mnt/cdrom2 directory.

Since you now know what exactly /dev/cdrom is pointing to (from the ls -l /dev/cdrom command earlier) you will know later in which drive to put your data or audio CDs when a program looks for something in /dev/cdrom.

Should you want to change where /dev/cdrom looks in the future, then type:

ln -s /mnt/cdrom<2> /dev/cdrom

as root. I put in the <2> because I don't know which device it's currently pointing to. If it's currently pointing to /mnt/cdrom then to switch it to cdrom2 you'd do as above but remove the <> from it. Hope this helps.

Nice follow up Texicle. I have a few things to add:

I chose grip because you can configure which device it's looking for a CD in. Check the config tab on it. Once you figure out which device is which, you can then edit grip to look at that device to play the audio cd's. You don't have to have it pointing towards a symlink, it can be pointing right at the device.

What does ls -l /etc/lilo.conf give you? How do you boot up?

Texicle: Mandy (depending on the version) uses DevFS. So the symlinks will have permissions listed as rxw for everyone. Further more, /dev/scd0 and so on are symlinks to a deeper device themselves. So even looking at them with ls -l will produce another device to look at. So to get to my point... When having someone look at /dev/scd0 with ls -l they might be needing to look at something else, like /dev/lun0/cdrom0 or something (just an example).

Also, the scsi-emulation might be what is looking like a scsi device, meaning it's IDE. That's why I want to see /etc/lilo.conf I also tend to suggest less to read files, as it's easier to scroll with and will suggest not viewing a binary file where cat will scroll it no matter what.

Anyway

Cool

Thanks for the info MasterC. I didn't even stop to think about the scsi emulation possibility. That information on Mandrake's setup is good to know. Thanks again.

See me right, I'm back (needs to be said in a broad Glaswegian accent for full effect)

Anyhow, when Chad (masterc) and me where trying to sus this self same problem, I could never decide whether it was something that I got wrong or whether I was just stupid - but I seem to recall that it was connected with me not having the vaguest notion of how to use XMMS.

Just to say that I went through most of the stages that have been posted earlier in this thread. The drive will play music if you use the buttons on the front - that confirms that it's got a connection to the sound card/chip - if you can see the contents of a data cd then that confirms that the drive is working.

The problem of actually getting XMMS to play some music, well, I would have to put a disc in and mess around, but as it's 0245 am here, no chance - I don't want to "get my ears bled".

i seem to remember managing to work out XMMS by looking at some of the HOWTO's. Read them and click away. You will sus it eventually - I did, and I've got a degree in stupidity.

Oh and if youre reading this thread Chad, I got the modem/router from Solwise last weekend. The basic configuration was very easy, I've just got to find out what the firewall is doing. And too see whether I need to close the 3 remaining open ports.

regards

John

p.s. Just for info, I could never sus out that other little gem for sound - Alsa, either.

Ha, this issue is starting to really piss me off again.

I've just been to look at the documentation at xmms.org (I think) and when you look at the FAQ, it basically says RTFM. More S**t written by someone who is supposed to be conversant with their subject, but has forgotten what it's like to be in a position of ignorance. Sometimes It makes me want to get hold of the documentation author, give them a bloody good shake, followed by a back handed "bitch slap" and scream "wake up you f*****g geek moron".

Since my post last night/this morning, i seem to remember, that Chad (masterc) was helping me get XMMS working with streaming radio - since then, I've had many many linux disasters and also found that real player is on the mandrake boxed set I bought. And now tend to use that for streaming radio.

But I am going to sus this audio cd thing

regards

John

You see, this is what happens, when I'm reminded of something that I should have sorted earlier.

I can't even get KSCD to make any sound now, it looks like it's playing but no sound comes out.

Rats, Rats, Rats, etc etc.

I'm off to cook some tea.

I'll look back in later.

regards

John

P.S. for Chad - do you remember a good while ago, I mentioned a snag with the running of my bike, and I couldn't sus that either? well just before the father in law (desig) went into hosp to have his bladder out, the bike started missing all the time. Luckily I had the use of his car for the duration (he went in jan 13th) and I think that I got the problem fixed this afternoon, with 166 pound's of carburetta diaphragms - yes and that was just 2 of them, one with a sizable split and one with a pinhole. But you could have knocked me down with a feather when the bloke in the shop said 71 pounds each plus VAT (@17.5%). And they had to come from Japan.