Music CD -- Win vs. Linux

[Ben Steeves]

On 6/27/05, Benjamin Sher <delphi123 at zebra.net> wrote:
> Dear friends:
> 
> Why can Windows read a music CD but not Linux?

Chances are you are using Windows Media Player to play your CDs in
Windows.  It reads the data digitally and uses processor cycles to
play the audio.  You don't specify which of the myriad players you are
using for Linux but chances are you are using a player which is
accessing the disc in analog -- over the two (or sometimes three) pin
wire that runs from the CD-ROM to your soundcard, and plays the audio
directly from the CD, bypassing your CPU altogether.

This means that you may need to adjust your mixer settings to turn up
the volume or unmute the CD or AUX channel (depending on how the audio
cable is wired to your soundcard) or you might not even have an audio
cord attached at all (many system builders forgo this step assuming
everyone will use a digital method nowadays).

You can read the audio digitally using XMMS (I believe you need an
XMMS plugin for this called "cdread-plugin").

-- 
Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
 The ASCII ribbon campaign     ( )            ben.steeves at gmail.com
   against HTML e-mail          X                GPG ID: 0xB3EBF1D9
http://www.metacon.ca/bcs      / \     Yahoo Messenger: ben_steeves