I am fairly new to this linux thing but I am finding that I am learning quick. I have Red Hat 8.0 and I have managed to get all the audio to work, but the normal CD's. They will play but there is not sound!!! I just don't know what to do. Help please.....

Maybe it's your mixer settings. I use kmix, which is part of the kdemultimedia package. Do you have an audio cable for the cd player?

I have the same problem(RH9 though). By searching archives on the forum, I found lots of messages about the audio cable solving the problem and so I humbly bought one and connected the CDROM to MB (mine has integrate sound device), but still no luck. Is there anything that must be done on top of installing cable?
When I put audio cd in, I know it plays ok since I hear the music if I connect a speaker to the "line out" in front of the cdrom.

Here are some things to check:

1) Do other audio programs work (xmms for mp3, etc)
2) Proper audio output plugin (oss, alsa, arts, esd)
3) Mixer settings

Sometimes if you run a program from a terminal it allows you to see error messages that would otherwise go unseen.

How silly...
It was the volume control on gnome-cd.

As you advised, I tried xmms from terminal and it worked fine. The problem was the gnome-cd autoplayed with volume down to zero (silly me, I didn't realize that at that moment).

Zac,
thank you very much for saving me alot of time searching archives again.

Dregondeath,
if you still have the problem, get a "cdrom audio cable" (cost me $2.99 + tax at compusa), connect the cdrom to your sound card (or motherbord, depending on your machine's configuration), and hopefully that will work for you too.

If you are interested in what's going on behind all this, here are the things that I've learned by searching archives of this forum(most of the words are quoted):
1. cdroms can send the sound signals directly to a sound card without wasting cpu cycles,
2. some os's (notably windows) are playing sounds off the media using software, which wastes handsome amount of cpu cycles.
3. this is also the reason that machines preloaded with such os play audio cds without any problem even though they don't have the cables,
4. many computer manufacturers don't put audio cables on their system to save few pennies, since it works anyway with preloaded os,
4. linux doesn't natively support software decoding
5. so, if your machine is one of those from such manufacturers, you need to buy and install the cable yourself.

Again, many thanks to Zac...