I am currently on Slackware 9.0, and can not hear CD Audio out of my CD Drive that 's audio cable is plugged into the SPDIF jack on my Sound Blaster Live. For a while I had the same issue with my CDRW that's audio cable is plugged into the analog jack on my sound card, I figured out that this was due to me loading the alsa drivers manually in my rc.local file...
i.e.

modprobe snd-emu10k1
modprobe snd-pcm-oss
modprobe snd-seq-oss

now I load them in my modules.conf file by doing this

#ALSA Setup
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

this cured me not hearing CD Audio from my CDRW w/ it's audio cable plugged into the analog jack on the SB Live Card. Is there any other alias I can create that would allow me to hear sound out of my CD Drive plugged into the SPDIF jack?

Thanks in advance

You may get support for it if you compile the alsa cvs source code.

ALSA CVS download

Scroll down to "Read-only anonymous CVS access is also available (CVS 1.9+ is required)"