No sound from cd player [SOLVED]

tabanus · l33t Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 638 Location: UK

Hopefully this is not too stupid a question, but...

I can't get any sound on CD playback. I have the same problem on two completely different Gentoo PCs.

Both are running KDE 3.3.1. The application I'm using is KsCD. The program appears to be running fine, but there's just no sound. Playback of sound files on the hard drive is fine, and I've successfully managed to rip a CD track to a .ogg file, and that worked fine (on one of them, not tried the other yet).

I suppose I must have set something up wrong, but what? Both use the same sound driver (intel i8x0); one of the PCs has an intel i810 board, the other an nForce2.

Thanks

SubAtomic · Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 11:53 am Post subject:

Is the audio cable from the cd-rom drive connected to your sound card?
_________________
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." -- Alan Kay

tabanus · l33t Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 638 Location: UK

I'm fairly sure everything is physically setup right, but I did build one of these PCs myself so I can't be 100% certain. I don't know any other way to test it other than trying to play a CD.

Thanks

SubAtomic · Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2004 1:05 pm Post subject:

If you have any CDs with mp3 or ogg vorbis files, you could try playing them in the cd-rom and if they do work then the audio cable thing is probably it (raw cd audio travels straight to your sound card).

I stupidly didnt plug the audio cable in on the last box I built and it took me quite a while to figure out the cause.
_________________
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." -- Alan Kay

tabanus · l33t Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 638 Location: UK

OK, got it sorted. Messing around in alsamixer, I discovered that CD was labelled [off]. The help screen in alsamixer didn't say how to switch it on. So I pressed every key on the keyboard, and pressing M (practically the last bloody key!) unmuted it. Got CD audio now

A simple enough solution...thought it would be. Pity there's no mention of it in the ALSA setup guide.

SubAtomic · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2004 2:43 am Post subject:

I havent looked at the alsa guide for a while but I do remember the last time I looked it did mention that alsa is muted by default.

By the way

SubAtomic · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2004 2:55 am Post subject:

tabanus · l33t Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 638 Location: UK

I read the same guide you just quoted, and followed the instructions exactly as written. I had no idea at what the guide meant by ncurses, so just typed in the quoted code to unmute the channels, which worked fine for all other sounds. Naturally, like you, I thought there was a problem with the audio cable from CDROM to sound card, and had the case opened and everything. Unfortunately there's no metion of unmuting a CD channel. I guess the code would be something like:

SubAtomic · Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 2:23 am Post subject:

Good to see you got it sorted.
Ncurses is an API that provides an application display on shell terminals.

Execute alsamixer from a shell to see what I mean.
_________________
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas." -- Alan Kay