SDB:Your CD Player Is Working But No Sound Is Produced

Symptom

In spite of being properly configured, your sound card remains silent when you play an audio CD.

Cause

There are two possible causes:

Wrong mixer settings
Missing audio cable connector

Solution

First check whether the channel for the CD drive is set to mute in the sound mixer. In addition, the volume slider should not be in the lowest position. KDE's soundmixer (accessible via the Multimedia section in K menu) is equipped with LEDs displayed above each slider. A dark green LED identifies a mute channel whereas a light green LED marks an active channel. In newer SUSE LINUX versions, the green LED has been replaced with a 'mute' option below each slider that you can enable/disable.

Furthermore, please note that some CD players (such as KsCD in KDE) may have their own volume sliders. Do not forget to check their settings, too. As for KsCD, the volume control is located below the main display.

Note:

In few exceptional cases, your CD-ROM drive might not be attached to the CD channel but to a different channel in the soundmixer. Just in case, it is advisable to test all the available sliders one by one.

If your speakers still remain silent, the reason is surely a missing audio cable connector between your CD-ROM drive and your sound card. In the meantime, modern systems are equipped with a new function via the IDE data cable that renders the audio cable unnecessary. Thus, you might not have any problems when playing audio CDs under operating systems other than Linux, but you might be unable to produce any sound with simple CD players under Linux.

In this case, use an IDE data cable to play your audio CDs. For this purpose, refer to the article: SDB:Input Plug-in "CD Audio Player" Does Not Work with xmms <keyword>player,music,audio,kscd</keyword>