Well, I feel pretty stupid after this one. Two weeks on and off searching the forums and google to figure out how come I had sound when playing games and when playing mp3's off my hard drive but not from CD I finally found an answer. A simple little cable plugged into the mobo then to the drive and voila cd's are working. Apparently windows sends the music signal down the ide cable and linux does not. I alsways wondered that extra little cable was for

This is one happy

Actually, that's only partly true. I haven't used the cable until I installed 10. It worked in 9.1, Debian, Slax, PcLinuxOS, Morphix, Knoppix, DamnSmallLinux, Mepis, MandrakeMove, and WindowsXP. It didn't work without the cable under Windows 98 or Mandrake 10.

My assumption is that the digital output is not developed yet for the sound drivers that are compatible with the 2.6 kernel. You've got an added benefit with the cable. You aren't devoting some extra CPU cycles to produce sound digitally now. Your computer will have those extra FPS.

Actually, in Mandrake 9.1 cds didn't play without the cable for me.

So your CPU had less work from the beginning too

yeah, but the anolog signals sound bad when amplified

I'm sure that the ALSA and Kernel 2.6 thing will be worked out soon.