Hiya..
I have a kind of a weird problem.. I have linux on a dual boot with XP on my Sony Vaio laptop.. However, for some reason, linux will not play any audio cd's. Its not a problem with the sound card, since I can hear sound from avi files on other cd's. However, if I rip the audio cd with grip or musicplayer, the subsequent files play pretty well from the hard drive. I have the same problem using Mandrake 9.2, Mandrake 10 Community & Official, and Fedora Core 2.
Any help will be much appreciated!

Cheers

does XP play it? if not then for playing audio cd's you need to connect the cable from the cdrom drive to sound card. (actually the audio cd's play on its own and do not need any CPU cycles / OS support).

XP does indeed play it.. I dont usually connect my laptop to the internet and had earlier read on another forum that some players try to connect to cddb to get the cd info and there might be problems if they can find the server, but i disabled that option but still no luck...

Does it play them but with no sound or just refuse to play them

It might CD audio level on your mixer panel.

This happened on my old Sony Vaio (366Mhz thing). It was something to do with the NeoMagic 256AV chip. I gave up in the end, but I do know that I used to get some kind of error showing - someone may be able to help if you can get an error. Try opening a terminal and running xmms from the command line. When you try to play a CD through it, it should give an error message. Failing that, look at /var/log/messages or dmesg for some clue.

Sorry I can't give you an exact answer... maybe I'll dig out my old laptop and see if I can see anything. Do you know which sound chip yours is using?

The problem is that its trying to use analog output to play the audio cd.

Try this.
Use xmms and in the options---> preferences-------> audio i/o plugins click on cdaudioplayer and hit configure. There should be a button that says analog output and one for digital output. Choose the digital output and it should work just fine. It will sound good too because now you can run it through the equalizer/mixer or just straight out.

* understand, that this only changes the settings for xmms. You will have to use xmms for cd playback.