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Playing CD Music Digital Output

From Bill Parks, Mithra

Answered By Lennart Benschop, Dave Maxwell, Serkan Akdag, Rob McMeekin, Robos

This thread is in response to Issue 79, Help Wanted #2 and all of these people sent in Tips. I'm sure there's really at least a quarter's worth here; that'd be Two Bits instead of Two Cents -- Heather

I purchased an eMachine to run Linux on. It came with (sorry) XP which I used to check out the hardware. It plays music CD's fine but uses digital data over the IDE buss rather than a cable from the CD drive to the sound input.

Loaded Red Hat 7.3 and it plays sounds fine but it won't play music CD's...the player just runs and the CD spins along.

How do I configure the CD/sound system to pick up the digital sound data on the IDE buss to play the music?

Thank You, Bill Parks

[Lennart] Linux does have a program that can play a CD by reading the digital data over the IDE bus, it's cdda2wav, included with most Linux distributions.

cdda2wav -D /dev/cdrom -t 1 -eN

will play track 1, if the KDE sound system isn't keeping /dev/dsp busy. The -eN options cause cdda2wav to echo the data to the soundcard and not write the ridded data to a file.

You can also try to connect an analog cable between the CD-ROM drive and the sound cards, as most PC's have.

[Dave] There is a plugin for XMMS that does this. It can be downloaded at

ftp://mud.stack.nl/pub/OuterSpace/willem

The version numbers are a little confusing. The latest version is:

xmms-cdread-0.14a.tar.gz

The one labeled 0.9a is not it. XMMS comes with a cd player plugin that is supposed to do this but it didn't work for me. To play a cd, start XMMS and open your /dev/cdrom device or whichever device the cdrom drive actually is. I'm currently playing a cd from a drive without it's audio cable so I suppose that means it works . Come to think of it, if you add an audio cable from your cd to your sound card then the player you attempted to use will work as well. The audio from this plugin will be cleaner as it passes through one less analog stage.

Another nice thing about this plugin is it will pull title data from Freedb and let you play individual tracks by name. The stock plugin won't do this.

Oh yeah! Be sure to disable the stock plugin before attempting to use this one. Right click on XMMS and choose Preferences.

[Serkan] Hello, You will need to enable the "Enable Digital Sound" from one of the configuration options of KDE and/or Gnome. There is an option like that somewhere but I can't remember but I am sure its in X and not the console. Also, you could type audio:/ at the KDE browser to view your CD-Player contents and open a multimedia player like XMMS and drag the files in the browser to the playlist of XMMS and play that way. It should work.

[Rob] Hello. I have an IDE CD-ROM drive and an IDE CD-RW drive. The CD-ROM has audio cables attatched to the Sound Card while the CD-RW does not. The CD-RW would not play compact discs until I configured it for writing (enable SCSI-Emulation). I'm not an expert. I don't know if this is supposed to be the case. It could just be a fluke, but it worked for me.

And, since someone may also want to play other sorts of fun noise with their player, and most easily find this thread instead... -- Heather

[Mithra]

Hai,

I use Caldera Linux . i Would like to watch movies in my syatem. But There is no s/w that would play .Dat file for me. Can any one suggest me a downloadable s/w that can Play .dat files.

[Robos] Try mplayer, it can do this. Url is https://www.mplayerhq.hu.

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