As stated, I believe my cdrom drive isnt talking to the sound card. Here's the breakdown...Audio plays fine for everything else...cd player works in windows...i can get audio if I hook up the line to the port in the front of the cdrom drive...but when I play a CD in linux with the line hooked up to the back of the sound card I get no sound. So, what I want to know is how to get linux to bridge the gap between the cdrom drive and my sound card.

BTW, the sound card is a soundblaster live

Usually the CD connects to the sound card with an internal cable that ends in a flat connector and plugs into the top of the sound card on the inside. Is that what you mean by "back of the sound card"?

Then you need to adjust both the CD and the master volume with the mixer application. Most desktops have a default mixer app (kmix for kde, etc), there are also command-line mixers such as aumix. Did you do that?

mlp

If that was the case why does windows have no problem doing it?
I looked in volume control in the linux menu and made sure cd wasnt muted, it wasnt, and turning it up or down makes no difference

Because windows uses something called DAE, or Digital Audio Extraction it's done through the IDE cables. Linux is supposed to be coming out with this feature soon, but for the general amount of people they'll just strap a small audio cable onto their drive and attach it to the sound card. DAE is CPU intensive (more so than using the actual audio cable anyway) so why would you want to NOT simply attach a cable and save your CPU for real things?

Just to let you know though, there have been some recent breakthroughs on this, one was pointed at to me by Tinkster and here's the link:
http://xmms.org/comments.php?show=P66

HTH

Cool

Killer, that makes sense, reminds me of winmodems. Well, ok where do I get one of those cables?

There is a program you can install. Its called cdda2wav. You can check the installation CDs to see if you have it. cdda2wav can either output to a wav file or to the sound card. Its not a gui program, so you have to manually enter in the tracks to play them. Though cdda2wav can be controlled by frontends or GUI programs (like tk/tcl for example) to make it easier to control.

You can get CD audio cable at a computer or electronic store. Make sure you buy the right one, because not many CD-ROM manufactures stick to standards. Don't forget to unmute the CD-ROM mixer.

no, I just ordered some cables, so hopefully that will solve the problem. Thnx though.