[lug] Help Getting Laptop CD Working

[rm at fabula.de]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 12:03:05PM -0500, John Karns wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, George Sexton wrote:
> 
> >I have a new Sony Vaio laptop with SUSE 9.2 on it and I'm having 
> >problems playing CDs:
> >
> >Sound does work I get various system noises, and the test in the sound 
> >control panel plays some music.
> >
> >The KDE Sound player comes up and identifies the disc and starts playing 
> >it, but no music comes out the speakers or headphone jack.
> >
> >I've brought up the KDE Mixer panel, and varified muting isn't turned, 
> >etc.
> >
> >Under Windows, the CD Play works for playing music.
> >
> >At this point, I'm really stumped. Does anyone have any ideas?
> 
> Possibly an issue of whether the CD device is being seen by the kernel as 
> ATA or as a SCSI device under scsi emulation.  If the scsi emulation 
> modules are being loaded, then you might try rmmod'ing them to run it as 
> pure ATA.  Or the contrary - if the scsi emulation modules are _not_ being 
> loaded, try loading them.

Hmm, this could be a rather different problem: sometimes hardware vendors do not
connect the CD drive's audio out pins with the soundcard's audio in pins (and some-
times the soundcard and/or the CD don't even have pins!). So when you start playing
an audio CD the drive spins up and starts sending (analog) audio out but it never
reaches the soundcard. The solution (iff you dont't want to /can't do hardware fixes):
play the audio by reading it from the CD as digital data and sendig it to the sound-
card. This _will_ put more load on the CPU but should always work. Not all Linux
CD players can do this (you need an plugin called 'xmms-cdread' for xmms i.e.).
BTW, Windows will _always_ play audio CDs through the CPU .... 


HTH Ralf Mattes
> -- 
> John Karns
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