The headphone jack on my PC case is dodgy, so I need to use the CD drive's headphone jack (luckily it has one) to listen to CDs. But this requires a CD-playing program that supports analog play mode.

(BTW, I've tried Ubuntu Edgy Eft, Kubuntu Dapper, eLive 0.5, openSUSE 10.1 - you name it, all the same)

I've tried the following:
1. kscd: 'Pause' function has been broken for years (does a complete 'stop' instead, can't restart except at start of CD). Also dies after a random amount of time (maybe 2 or 3 tracks). Fundamentally broken. Is it still supported?

2. xmms: Apart from the new brokenness in Edgy Eft (which I can work around - barely), it'll only play the first 12 tracks on a CD. Plenty of other minor annoyances but also, in general, broken. Is it still supported?

Can someone recommend a modern (i.e. supported/maintained) CD-playing program that supports analog play mode? All of those that come with my distros (apart from xmms and kscd) seem to only support digital playback, but maybe I've missed something.

It's a little ironic that it was easier to play a CD on Red Hat 5.2 back in 1999 than it is on today's 'modern' distros. Some progress, huh?

No it does not in fact no software is needed at all.

Insert the audio CD into the drive and press play on the drive if available, if not then use the software. In either case just plug the headphones in the CD drives jack and adjust the volume using the volume control on the drive if available.

When a CD drive is in analog mode, nothing musical goes through the digital cable. When a CD player is in digital mode, nothing at all goes through the analog channels which are (a) the headphones and (b) the analog cable if present (usually not, and no use in this case anyway). PCs' CD drives all work this way (except maybe the ones with a 'Play' button, etc, on them, which I don' got).

So "use the software" is not very helpful: as I described, "the software" is either broken for analog (kscd/xmms) or digital-only (everything else, as far as I can tell) in which case the headphone socket is silent. If you have a suggestion as to WHICH software will work unbrokenly for analog playback, I'd like to hear it. THIS was my original question.

(BTW, analog playback works perfectly on Windows's Media Player, so I know it's not a hardware problem.)