I'm a newbie working on a new install of debian 3.1. I got the audio to work, and I can play music files that I've ripped. I can also rip files. My xmms preferences show that the 'CD Audio Player' plugin is there. I'm not sure it's configured properly. My two drives are a little strange. One's a cd-dvd drive and the second is a cd-rw drive. Do I have to set them to special /dev/ values to get them to work? I'm not really concerned right now with getting dvds or burning to work, but do they need special device drivers or something to play music?

Any help would really be apreciated!!

No, as far as I know you do not need special /dev values. If you have standard IDE CD / DVD-ROM /RW drives, the drive on the first IDE channel should be /dev/hdc and the drive on the second channel (or the slave) should be /dev/hdd. Usually, if you are using a stock distro these are automatically detected and correctly set up to be instantly ready for use once the kernel is started up. At least, this is how it works under Fedora.

You shouldn't need any special device drivers or settings to play CD music.

The rips you refer to that you can play - did you make them on that same Linux system? If you did that means that your CD drives work 100%.

I'm not sure about getting to listen CD's with XMMS, you should have another CD player app on your desktop. I've got FC3 (yeah - old - I know) and I've got a seperate app in the KDE menu for a CD player. See if you have something similar? It sounds as if your setup should be working allright (the fact that you have sound, for example) but I think there is some screwup with the XMMS CD Playing plugin that now makes it -look- as if audio CD playback does not work, when it fact it might be working fine - there's just a problem with the XMMS plugin.

Like said, you shouldn't need to tweak the device files in any special way (unless there's a permissions problem, but if there was, you'd know about it - it produces big warnings). I'd follow these steps to try and deduce the source of this problem:

1) if you have dual-boot, make sure some cd plays on the other OS correctly (have you been able to play cds with this pc before?)
2) especially on laptops, make sure you know whether or not the drive(s) use digital sound output -- some programs need to have a box checked in their configuration to be able to play from such drives
3) try other player applications, not just xmms - you can tweak that later
4) see that your mixer volume levels haven't suddenly been set to 0
5) try playing the cd with a different user, maybe even root (just a try, don't start using it daily!)

By chance, do you use KDE? If so, check this out, go to kcontrol and there is a listing for audio CDs. There you can choose which cd is the "audio cd player". There is a setting to use either/or but it has never worked for me in about two years of running debian sid/KDE and my 2 CD drive set up. I have always had to designate one of the drives specially.

Out of curiosity, is the the audio cable connected? It's a small cable(not the IDE cable) that goes from the CD drive to your motherboard. I could be mistaken, but I don't think XMMS uses digital audio extraction. Therefore, you'd need the audio cable in order to actually "hear" the music.

In newer gnome under preferences menu there is removable disks and drives,where the option to play audio cd's when inserted..

Well the audio cable I don't know about. I'll check that out. I am using kde, though. I did get it to work. In xmms prefferences I selected the options->prefferences and highlighted the 'CD Audio Player' input plugin. Under configure, under 'play mode', I clicked the 'digital audio extraction' checkbox. That and spelling out the device (/dev/hdc) and directory (/media/cdrom0) got xmms to play my cds on the first drive. I also switched the output plugin from OSS to 'ALSA 1.2.10 output plugin [libALSA.so]'. Configuring the alsa output plugin I checked 'use software volume control'. All together all these things worked. I'll check about the cable. I'm guessing I don't have one... if that's possible. I think the 'digital audio extraction' was important. Thanks everybody for the help!!

Good to hear it's working. If you're using Digital Audio Extraction, then there's no need for the analog audio cable to be connected. I wasn't aware of XMMS's ability to use Digital from CD drives, good info to know.