First off, thank you for this wonderful treasure trove of information. I've used this forum in lurk mode more than once to get things such as my D-Link wireless card working. I did not locate anything which helped answer the below question in the archives, so I apologize in advance if I missed something.

I am unable to play any audio CDs (or rip with Grip) with either of my cd drives with Totem, mplayer, or KsCD. The following are my fstab entries for the drives:

umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noa /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom2 auto uto,ro,exec,users 0 0
umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noa /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom auto uto,ro,exec, users 0 0

In KsCD I've tried putting the drive as /mnt/cdrom/, /mnt/cdrom2/, /dev/hdc/, and /dev/hdd/, and none of them register as having an audio cd, or playing. Totem says that it was unable to play the cd, although a plugin is present. mplayer loads up, and then dumps out without an error.

Data cds seem to work fine.

Thank you in advance for the assistance.

ok, well you need to use the device names, not the mount point names, as you don't mount audio cd's. despite windows trying to tell you otherwise, there is no file system on a pure audio cd. so try "grip --device=/dev/hdc"

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried what you presented and it comes back with Error: Unable to initialize /dev/hdd, and does the same with hdc. Yes, there were audio disks in both times. Frustrating, isn't it?

can you mount them with data cd's in the drives? any dmesg errors of note?

Actually let's back up a few steps.

You have two CD/DVD drives.

Usually (but not always) a sound card or motherboard has only one input for the audio output from the CD.

In this case, can you listen to audio from either of your CD players in say Winblows?

Is the analog and SPIF cable connected?

Have you tried listening to the audio while adjusting the volume levels in kmix?

By default I believe that CD output is turned all the way down.

Do you hear other sounds in KDE / Linux? E.G. MP3's?

Actually, I believe that I have traced the problem back to permissions. If I su in on console and run Grip, everything is fine and dandy, and I an rip/play CD's to my hearts content. Now I just need to figure out how to change my default permissions on my userid enough to allow me to play audio CD's. Strange, really.

Try changing the perms on /dev/dsp

e.g.

chmod 777 /dev/dsp