I'm using Redhat 7.2 along with an SBLive! audio card. Sound is fine, wav files play ok, etc. My only problem seems to be playing commercial audio cd's. The Gnome and KDE cd players download CDDB info from the web, player "plays" the songs, but no sound. Now then, I can play MP3 cd's I've burned with no problems using the same hardware. I've tried different players, different audio cd's, but still no sound. Redhat Support told me to look at the /var/log/messages and try to find an error such as "sr0: CDROM (ioctl) reports illegal request" or something similar. I didn't find any. Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks
Barry Wilson
:smash:

xplaycd is a CD player you may want to try.

Unlike mp3 files or even mp3 burned cdroms, audio CDs
do not have a file system. They need to be read raw from the
device and played. Therefore, if you are playing a way file or
an mp3 file, it is essentially the same i.e you are reading from
a file system, quite unlike an audio CD.

I am curious to know if the mp3 CDs you burned are in mp3 format
or have you converted those into regular audio CDs?

Thanks for your reply, Concoran. The MP3's I've burned are in mp3 format on the cd's I can play. I do understand that one can't "mount" commercial audio because of it's format. I'm trying to rule out cd hardware problems since I can play mp3 audio from cd. I'm just stumped as to why I can't play commercial audio (whatever you call it's format). Redhat did tell me that they've had several such problems reported, I don't know if it's a distro problem or what.

Even I had this problem, i.e inability of any of standard media
players (i.e gnome or kde ) to play audio CDs. I ended up with
xplaycd when it worked. Hope it works for you too.

Since, you are able to use CD drive or any CD, there should
not be a problem with hardware For your players to work, make
sure /dev/cdrom exists and that all the users have permission
to read from it.

Did u get a chance to use xplaycd?

Just a thaught for audio cd's you need a link from the the cd drive to the sound card. When u play audio cd's try plugging headphones in jack on cd if u can hear music then drive ok. mp3 etc are just read from the cd and get to the soundcard vis the os driver same as playing mp3's from hd. Hope this helps.

That's right. I broke my head over this, once.

do you have a play button?

it should play without any software just turn the computer on and hit the play button.

If not you probably don't have the cable hooked up, or check the cable for a broken wire.

Update! Well, all your posts got me thinking about that cd-to-sound card wire link. My SBLive! card only ever worked on the digital-out jack on the back panel of the sound card (in the Winblows days). Looking at the back of the cd hardware, I noticed the link-wire was plugged into the 4-wire analog-out jack and into the analog-in on the sound board. Hmmm! Sooo, I got a sharp razor blade and basically cut the 4-wire prongs on the link wire in half on both ends and made a 2-wire plugin. After plugging in this plug from the digital-out on the cd deck to the digital-in on the sound board.......well, let's just say that Steely Dan never sounded so good as it does now. Windows 2000 (when I had it on my pc) I guess could have cared less about that wire. I can now honestly say that I'm totally Microsoft free and chilling out with some great notes to boot. Thank you guys for your responses as I might never have checked that out. Now then, what to play next......