Perhaps the soundcard isn't properly installed
or the cd-audio channel is muted in the configuration.
I think that is the problem. I don't have an audio-cable connected to my DVD player and I can still hear the sound, which is better quality as well.

Technocally speaking: if the sound goes through the audio-cable it is analog. and if the sound of is going through the IDE cable then it remains digital, which explains why you can rip audio at high speeds.
If you would create ogg files with an audio-cable via the soundcard then a cd of 60 minutes would also take 60 minutes to convert to mp3/ogg's or wav for that matter.

I still think that the drivers aren't working fine or the configuration isn't good.
what kind of soundcard do you have ?

Wow, that's a really crap way of doing it. I had no idea it was doing that... Oh well.

With this in mind helloyo, I think it's safe to say that the XMMS plugin is stuffed. There are two available (maybe more? not sure), try the otherone.

There is a digital output for cd-rom's too - I was trying to get that configged on my system but I did not look too much into it as analog was working and I don't really use audio from a cd very much anyhow.

Thanks for letting me know that it can be dont without an audio cable - I actually like that idea - and it is very logical - in fact I remember years ago when first getting into computers I thought it was odd that you needed an audio cable at all and was surprized to hear the audio was seperate. If I ever need to rip alot of audio I will implement this feature - Thanks alot.

question - the digital cable I am referring to - do you happen to know the thru put of it? I am guessing it would less than the IDE cable but how much of the IDE cable would be dedicated to audio rather than data?