Installed Mandrake 10.0 from download and it automatically found my sound card (hurray!). I can play DVD movies (e.g., using Totem Movie Player) and sound is fine. However, I get no sound when playing CD's (e.g., using KsCD). According to answer on another thread ("Mandrake 10, no sound from CD, poor sound with DVD"), someone suggested either buying a CD-audio cable with a 4-pin molex connector or using the program cdd2wav. Here are my questions:

1. Why is this necessary? Is this because I have an unsupported sound card?
2. I re-installed Linux with the cdd2wav program. Does this work instead of KsCD or along with it? Is there a convenient way to simply play CD's on this system using a standard player?

I'm a newbie to Linux (at least as a personal PC with multimedia). I don't understand why this is so hard. On Win XP, I had to install the driver for the sound card from a CD, but after that it worked with the CD player just fine.

Thanks for your help.

Ad 1.) No, it's because you don't seem to have the
quite common CD-Audio cable.

Ad 2.) I'd suggest using xmms, it has a easy to install
plugin that will play CD's digitally. The biggest downside
of this method (as opposed to the audio-cable) is that
it needs CPU.

[edit]
Download link [/edit]


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the advice. It turns out that the cable came with my DVD-ROM and I just didn't see it. For curiosity, why is this cable needed for some applications and not others? (e.g., not needed to play CD's in Windows or DVD's in Linux, but needed for CD's in Linux)

Thanks again!

DVD = mpeg-movie, both video and audio data are compressed
digital information. Both come over the ide interface, the application
decodes/decompresses them, and passes info on to soundcard
and videocard.
CD = Player does that for you. There are (see another CD sound
thread yesterday) digital transfer plugins for xmms, for instance,
but why bother wasting CPU if the cable does the same?


Cheers,
Tink