This should be easily answered. I do have the CD audio player plugin installed and enabled, btw.

I found that a much easier way to get cd audio working is just to use a cable between your soundcard and cd rom.

It already has one. I can listen to CDs on my computer using the KDE cd player application. (Although my hi-fi sounds much better). I just wondered how to get xmms to do it.

there is a plugin for xmms to play cd.
forgot the name, its in mandrake distro anyway

I believe I already have it installed. In the Audio I/O plugins screen, one of the plugins listed is called "CD Audio Player 1.2.7 [libcdaudio.so]" which sounds very much like the ticket. It is enabled, too. So, how do I use it? I'm finding it less than obvious.

That's what I thought, too. But there is another plugin you'll have to get.
You need to download and install the "xmms-cdread" plugin. I've seen it packaged for debian and redhat. Then make sure that the current account has access to your cd device. For instance, I had to add my user account to group 'disk' since "ls -l /dev/hdc " returned something like
"br--r----- 1 root disk ....."

ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/...d-0.14a.tar.gz

Then configure your plugins and try to point xmms to the device. In the 'open/add file' dialog, I just had to point it to '/dev/hdc'. I had to have both cd-related plugins enabled though, so maybe that will help.

Remember, if you add a user to a group, the changes won't take effect until that user logs in again. You don't have to have the audio cable, nor do you have to mount the drive.


edit:
You may be able to disable the cdaudio plugin. I was so glad that I got it to play that I didn't bother seeing if it still worked after disabling it. Apparently the cdaudio plugin is meant to be used with the analog cable.

xmms can read CDs out of the box, in the xmms options dialog select the CD Player input plugin, click configure
add your CD drive(s) if you have a decent drive you can use digital audio extraction, point it at the device (/dev/hdd) and the mount point (/mnt/hdd)
i don't recommend using the /dev/cdrom because it is just a symlink to /dev/hd(b,c,d) or whatever your drive is
do "ls -l /dev/cdrom" to see where it's pointing.
click "check drive" to test it, if it says tests OK then all is well, if it bitches about not having permissions ar something similar, do what Tremontane said, set the /dev/hd(b,c,d) file to readable by everyone (as root "chmod 444 /dev/hd(b,c,d)"
then to do the actual playing you open the directory /mnt/hd(b,c,d) or whatever you put in the xmms CD configuration

hey, if you get it working, let us know what you did. good luck

open file, open cdda track from cd, itll play all cd...
like this on my system, without plugin, cant open...