Running Slackware 13.37. Have CD player and writer on same cable to motherboard. An audio cable connects to the player.
Audacious emits dialog box with "No audio capable CD drive found" when CD in player but runs OK if in writer/player.
All connections checked.
Tried mplayer cdda://1 -cache 8192 in both drives and same CD. Plays in writer but in player I get:
Playing cdda://1
Can't open disk
Failed to open cdda://1
Any suggestions?

Seems to be a device recognition problem.
Try putting the player and the writer on separate cables.

I don't know the exact problem with audacious here, but I find xmms to be a good CD audio player to try when having trouble playing with other players.

Start xmms, right click on it, open options/preferences -> Audio I/O Plugins, and configure the CD Audio Player 1.2.11 [libcdaudio.so] plugin:

First, make a directory in your home directory where xmms will mount the CD, and where you will see the CDDA files:

cd ~
mkdir xmms-cd

Then, in the CD Audio Player 1.2.11 configuration:

Device: /dev/sr0 (this is the typical cd device, change if yours is different)
Directory: /home/<your username>/xmms-cd

Check <*> digital audio extraction

This plugin seems fairly good to try when other things are not working. You can put a CD in, and hit the "Check drive" button and then look in xmms-cd and see the audio files. Maybe you can use xmms! It still has uses!

I would unplug the audio cable. I've never needed to use one to get sound off a CD under Linux, and it's probably not even being recognized (as allend says).

Allend & Eternal... I do not have another port to test by separating the devices to their own port but I will try a test by moving the CD-W cable to the CD-R device and then also with & without the audio cable. I do recall going thru a similar exercise when I installed which is why they are that way now.

Foobarz, I have no preference as to audio player but since both mplayer and audacious do not recognize the CD player I presume the problem to be hardware. U may be correct about configuring so will double check that tonight.
Thanx all and will follow with results ASAP.

If you have IDE optical drives then sometimes it is necessary to jumper them explicitly as Master and Slave, instead of using Cable Select. I found this to be the case especially where older Western Digital hard disks were used on the other IDE channel.

Thanks to all and sorry it took so long to get back.
I had the jumpers set correctly with the audio cable on the ROM device.
BIOS recognized DVD R/W device as Phillips DVD+/-RW and ROM as slave HL-DT-STDVD-ROM-G.
Subsequently jumpered ROM to master and put it on master end of cable with audio cable attatched. It was recognized in BIOS as HL-DT-STDVD-ROM-G and master. Disconnecting audio cable made no difference and as dis/connected neither File Manager nor Audacious could recognize the ROM.
Reconnected and re-jumpered both devices and left off audio cable. Still ROM recognized by BIOS as slave but neither File Manager nor Audacious can find the ROM.
Sounds like a dead ROM player but can that be when BIOS can detect it?