I am definitely a "newbie", but a very happy Mandrake Linux 8.2 user!
Bye, bye XP!

To the point! I have a CD-RW that is correctly configured and mountable as a scsi-emulated device on the secondary master IDE connection (hdc). I also have a CD-ROM drive on the secondary slave cable (hdd). I can play audio CDs on the hdd mount but not on the CD-RW. Why? You may ask why do I want to do this if the standard CD-ROM drive works. Well, curiosity and challenge - it is merely one of those problems that niggles at you until you sort it out. I'm sure readers of this message will gettit!

So can anyone help me resolve this conundrum. Audio on my CD-RW please!

well what doesn't work abuot it? try just running "xmms /dev/scd0" or whatever the scsi device reference is, the hdX device won't work

And don't try to mount audio CDs, they are not mountable due to lack of filesystem, audio CD's simply don't have filesystem associated with them.

Thanks for the prompt replies. I can't believe I'm still awake!

My scsi-emulated drive is denoted by /dev/scd0 so I tried your command with the xmms utility, but the xmms simply doesn't pick up any medium. I was aware that audio CDs couldn't be mounted as I checked out some previous postings on the site. I presume therefore that the problem is something to do with the scsi emulation as the CD playing utilities on my distribution recognise the second IDE/ATAPI device perfectly for playing back audio. GCombust also picks up audio CDs on the pseudo-scsi drive and I can dump whole CDs onto an image file using that particular piece of software (multi-session is another thing altogether!). So I don't quite understand why the simple act of playing back is such a problem. Neither kscd nor xmms will pick up the /dev/scd0 drive. Please correct my technical lack of know-how! Ta.

Newbie question here, why do you emulate the IDE device as a scsi?? Just wondering!

Does your burner have an audio cable connected to the sound card?

You only need to do this for a burner, have a look at this explanation from the creator of cdrecord on why linux uses scsi emulation for cd writing.