I can hear system sounds, I can listen to mp3's on Amarok, but once I pop in a music CD, it starts playing, but there's no sound whatsoever. I double checked the mixer settings, the volume, etc. The drive is mounted as I can read data CD's. Do I need to mount it to play music CD's or what? Any help appreciated.

Is the audio cable from your cdrom pluged into the sound card. try xmms goto audio plugins cd audio choose digital audio extraction. right click upper left corner play directory /mnt/cdrom

Did you try switching engines in the options?? just a thought...

Thanks for your reply. For starters, when I insert a CD in the tray the defaul app that stars playing it is KsCD (no sound). The CD's play OK when I'm in Windows, so audio cables being plugged correctly isn't an issue.
In xmms I've changed to digital audio extraction, and chose play directory /mnt/cdrom. I still can't hear the sound, but see the progress.
I don't know what is causing this problem. Any more tips?

Have you unmuted the cd player settings in kmix.

You are experiencing this problem because your CD drive doesn't have a cable connection between the drive and your sound card. You don't experience this problem in Windoze because it is smart enough to get its CD sound through the IDE connection. There are some Linux music players that will play audio CDs and use the IDE connection. KsCD happens to be one that doesn't.

As suggested by someone else, try another player until you find one that works through an IDE connection, or connect your CD drive to your soundcard's CD connector.

Cheers

XMMS will do this, but you need to download a special patch for it, do a search on my name, I relayed a link to somebody not even a week ago.