[vox-tech] update on the audio CD problem

[Norm Matloff]

Many thanks to Micah and Bill for their response to my query on the audio CD
problem.  Here is the result.

Recall that on my Linux box at home, I could not play audio CDs.  The
sliding bar on CD Player did move, indicating that the CD was playing,
but no sound came out, even though sound worked fine otherwise on my
machine.  On my daughter's Linux machine, the sliding bar didn't even
move.

I was able to get my machine to work by taking a combination of Micah's
and Bill's advice, PLUS something I found on the Web.  Here is what I
did:

1.  I downloaded and installed a plugin for XMMS, 

       xmms-cdread-0.14a-4mdk.i586.rpm

    (It did not seem to matter that that was a Mandrake RPM while my
    machine runs Fedora Core 4.)

2.  In XMMS, I went to Options and then the Audio I/O Plugins tab.

3.  I selected "CD Audio Player [libcdaudio.so]" and disabled it.

4.  I selected "AudioCD Reader [libcdread.so]" and enabled it.

5.  I specified my CD device (/dev/hdc in my case).

6.  I clicked on "Add CD to playlist."

7.  In the Output tab, I chose "Read Digital CD Audio."

Then everything worked fine.

Mind you, I do not fully understand the details of why these steps were
necessary, but they all did seem to indeed be necessary.  (I tried
experimenting by omitting one step or another, and it didn't work.)

I then turned to my daughter's machine.  I had thought this one would be
harder, since the symptoms there had been worse.  But it turned out to
be a very simple problem in that case:  The file permissions on /dev/hdc
were not set correctly. :-)

Thanks again, Micah and Bill.

Norm