Only one speaker works when playing audio cds
 

I played an audio cd and only the left speaker was working. Normally I play oggs, flac, mp3 and both speakers work well.

I check alsa mixer and all was set correctly there and then checked aumix and that was setup correctly too.

What am I not checking?

This may be an ALSA bug. Try a newer version.

I have ALSA set to exclude in my swaret.conf file, because the newer versions of ALSA didn't work well and I couldn't get any sound...

Are you playing the audio CDs in analogue mode, or digital extraction?

If it's analogue, it could be as simple as needing to replace your CD audio cable.

Not sure what you mean?

Analogue is just playing back, correct?

Digital Extraction is ripping?

I'm only playing audio right now.

are you using xmms ?
if so, you could try the other cd input-plugin.
( there's one analog and one digital )

if the digital is ok, and the analog is just one channal,
the cable between your cd drive and souncard or mobo is nogood
(as killerbob said )

egag

I had this issue back in Fedora Core 3. Both speakers had been working for months untill the last day, only one worked...never did understand why.

Probably the CD audio cable, then.

When I say "digital", I mean that some newer CD player software has the option of using the analogue cable or digital extraction. In a sense, digital extraction *does* mean ripping the sound, but only because the software reads the data directly from the CD and does the sound mixing in system memory. The major advantage is that most CDROM drives only have an 8- or 12-bit DAC, whereas newer sound cards usually have at least a 16-bit DAC (digital-analogue converter). That's where the "16" in SoundBlaster 16 came from, to give you an idea of how old that technology is. For CD Audio, 12-bit is more than enough, but for DVD audio and multi-channel CD-DA, it's not even close. So you do the decoding in software, and use what your sound card is capable of. Most of the time, you won't hear a difference, but if you're listening to something that's recorded in 5.1 and your sound card/speakers are capable of it, you'll actually get the 5.1 instead of the 2.0 downmix that the CDROM produces.

For Analogue mode, the CDROM drive is doing the digital-analogue conversion, and then uses an audio patch cable to plug into your sound card. This audio cable is pretty flimsy, and connects the CDROM directly to the sound card. Until fairly recently (around 5 years ago), this was the only way to play CDs on a computer, largely because there was no need for better sound, and there was no reason to tie up system resources on audio decoding when the CDROM was perfectly capable of doing it in firmware. In everything I've bothered to check except Windows Media Player, analogue is still the default. Anyway, in analogue mode, your CDROM is doing the audio decoding, and the signal is carried through a pair of copper wires into your soundcard's input, and from there maybe amplified but otherwise sent directly to the speakers without modification. If either the cable or the connector at either end is defective, you'll have a problem with sound. Not to say that wouldn't cause a problem in digital mode, either, but the problem would be more than just sound.