I have a friend with a Mandrake 10 (or possibly 10.1) box that will not play CDs. He has three CD-ROM drives (one CD-ROM, one DVD-ROM, and one DVD-RW). All of them automount a data CD just fine. But using KsCD, the only drive that will play an audio CD is the DVD-RW, which is through a USB port mounted as /dev/scd0. It will play, but no sound comes out. Totem will play an MP3 and sound does come out, so the audio is not the problem. If a CD is put in the other two CD-ROMs (IDE drives) KsCD won't even see it.

Help? :-)

~ Justin

Do you have the analog CD cable hooked up on your CD drive? On the back of the CD-ROM drive is a plug for the analog audio wire, which you hook up to your sound card (if it supports it)

My soundcard (Soundblaster Audigy 2) doesn't have one that I know of so I just use digital audio extraction whenever it's available.

the best way out of this one from personal experience is to use xine to play cd's, mp3's, etc. This way you won't need an audio cable at all!

okay, how do i install Xine on a Mandrake machine. I only Gentoo machines. no emerge on this machine. :-)

~ Justin

all the info you need will be found on these pages

http://xinehq.de/index.php/releases

with RPM's for mandrake with install instructions on this page

http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/

hope this helps!!

Don't be so sure -- alsamixer can be quite complicted and confusing and i bet the cd ext source playback could be just muted or turned down.
show output of the command
amixer get CD

another thingie, KsCD has the location of the cdrom device (usually /dev/cdrom) in it's settings, that's why you couldn't play from those other drives.
The sound question is usually a mixer settings issue, check them. As Spasmolytic said, it can be that darned cable, had the same problem once, it took me months to find out. 'till I opened up my case for smthing else, grmbl. Usually you only have 1 socket to plug in a cdrom-drive, so I suspect you're going to be able to play 1 cd max anyway.

well the drive that KsCD will play is an external drive, so it definitely does not have an audio cable to the mobo. i don't know if this is simulated through the USB connection though - i have no experience with external drives.

i will suggest to my friend that he look at the settings of KsCD and try to get one of his other two CD drives, most likely the one that was installed first off-the-shelf with the computer, and try to play a disc through that. does anyone know what the settings file of KsCD is called?

if that doesn't work he could try to mess with alsamixer to see if one of the channels is muted. finally, he could install Xine and see if that works.

any other suggestions?

thanks for the help thus far...

~ Justin

Keep in mind that you have to change the KsCD setting for the drive, each time that you try listening to a cd on a different drive!

When opening KsCD->extras->Configure KsCD... then the field is right in front of you.

Also, as far as installing Xine.... Use the Mandrake Contol Center. The rpm's for Xine are most likely included with the distribution (if he still has his install cd's).

for that external drive -- instead of the analog audio cable cd thing just use xmms and choose as the input plugin "CD Audio Player"
it uses libcdaudio to play cds digitally and is better anyway

How useful! I just tried it, and that plugin is set by default to get it's input from analog. Simply hit the configure button and select the proper radio-button for digital extraction rather than analog input.

another hint for installing rpms in mandy, use 'urpmi' from the commandline. This way you can use the easy urpmi mirrors:
--> check out http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/