cd problem, playing music with digital cable
 

I'm having a (small) problem with cd playing in SuSE.

I have a soundblaster Live 5.1 and I recently bought a BTC Combo drive 52X24X52/16X. It came with an analog connection to the soundcard, but who wants analog? So I plugged in the digital connector that came with the sound card. It doesn't work in Linux. The analog one works, but no sound comes out the center speaker or the rear speakers. I'm using KsCD to play the cds and had to go into the mixer window of KAMix, click on the "Ext. Source playback" and unmute the AUX slider to get sound out of the front 2 speakers.

I booted up into Windows 98SE and enabled digital playback in the multimedia setup section. Now the digital line worked fine, but when I rebooted my BIOS wouldn't detect my hard drives!!! What gives? Had to unplug the digital connector, then hard drives were detected fine. What would cause this? I have it set up as Secondary Master. I have two hard drives and two cdrom drives. I tried the digital connector on the other cdrom, same thing.

A similar thing happened when I installed the software that came bundled with the combo drive CyberLink PowerDVD XP 4.0
After install it ran a diagnostic and asked if I'd like to enable DMA, why not? So I did, and rebooted. Boom, no more hard drives again! Had to unplug the IDE cable and boot back into windows. PowerDVD asked if I'd like to restore all changes. Yes!! And got my hard drives back with combo drive plugged in again.

When I went into Yast and selected IDE DMA setup it shows that both cdroms have DMA set to off. When I set the cdrw/dvd dma mode to DMA ON (default) the very scary warning of "Enabling DMA on some devices can cause data loss or system lock" I didn't know if I'd be able to undo this system lock so I erred on the side of caution and aborted.

Is there a problem with the drive, my BIOS, what? I'm running a PIII 1.13 GHz

Hi.

I wouldn't worry too much about the dire warnings about DMA - the warnings are given regardless of what you're doing.

The digital playback in Win 98 (Windows media palyer I presume) doesn't use the digital cable - it uses the IDE cable, basically ripping the cd, but instead of saving the audio to disk, it puts it out through the sound card. Xine can do a similar thing, as can xmms with the cdda plugin so you don't need the cable to the digital port at all.

As for your drives not being detected, I'm not sure. It could be that the digital connection at the back of the cdrom isn't a digital connection at all - I've seen a few mis-labeled ones before.

Dave

Problem solved!
 

Seems like my other cdrom can't have DMA enabled and it's on the same cable as my cdrw/dvd drive. Don't know why that should make a difference, but once I unplugged the cdrom I could enable DMA on the combo drive in windows and Linux.

Hope that helps someone if they get the same problem as me!

Dave.