I was just trying to play a couple songs from a music CD, but when I press "9" to play a song, the cd-rom starts spinning, but I there's no sound.

All others apps work fine and seems to mix alright as well.

After a fresh install, I've noticed that CD audio is muted in alsamixer.
Have you looked in alsamixer yet?


-Andy

I got a ThinkPad T60 and the CD sound is all the way up to 100% in alsamixer and I still have no sound.

If I'm not mistaken, workbone is an old-school cd player. All it does is issue a command to you cdrom controller telling it to start playing the audio. Unless you've got an analog audio cable connecting your cdplayer directly to your sound card (not that common these days), or a headphone jack/volume knob built into the front of your cd drive itself (also not that common these days) you're not going to find much use for workbone.

You need to look for a cd player application that does digital audio rather than analog. Anyone know of a command-line workbone equivalent that works with the more modern drives?

I believe you are mistaken.

I have this settup without an analog CD-to-sound card cable.

Try to adjust the 'Wave' control in ALSAMixer. Adjust everything to 100% except
the master volume (which should be at about 10%) start a CD and slowly slide
up the master. If you do hear your source you know you just have to figure
out the correct sliders to adjust your sound system.

It's a bit of a pain.

On this old P3-800 Dell box with a SBLive 1024 and an old style cdrom complete with volume control and headphone jack on the front panel, If you start a cd playing in workbone and then exit the program, the cd keeps playing (I can hear the audio). Top doesn't show any processes using cpu, and iostat doesn't show any block io on the cdrom device itself. This seems to suggest to me that its the hardware itself that is processing the audio and passing it directly to the sound card. I didn't think this could be done over an IDE cable alone (and I certainly never got it working on my main system with an onboard ALC650F/AC97), but if you say your system is running without an audio link cable I'll take your word for it. Perhaps its something specific to the audio chipset or perhaps not all cd/dvd drives have the circuitry to support it. Whatever the reason, I never got it working on my modern AC97 based box.

edit:

BTW, on the Soundblaster 1024, the PCM and Wave sliders have no effect on the cd audio playback volume at all. However the CD and Master sliders do.