FAQ:I am trying to play an audio CD, and I do not hear anything.
Chances are you're missing a cable between the CD drive and the sound card/onboard sound chip. There are 2 ways a computer can play an Audio CD:
Method one
Tell the CD drive to play an audio CD, and the sound card to pass what it gets on its CD Input to the speakers. This is what kscd (the default CD player in Ark Linux) does, and it's what makes more sense: This doesn't need any CPU power. The downside to this method is that it needs a connection between the CD drive and the sound chip, which some hardware makers seem to "forget" (the connectors are there on all hardware - but apparently a small cable is deemed too expensive by some HW makers). If this is your problem, add the cable, or see below for a software solution
Method two
Tell the CD drive to send the audio tracks as data, encode them, and send the data to the sound card via the CPU - This is not exactly the smartest way because it puts unnecessary loads on the CPU and doesn't make use of functionality the hardware has -- but this is what Windows does, therefore you didn't notice this hardware defect before if you've just switched. There are also some Linux based CD players that use this approach -- try using mplayer or amarok instead of kscd.
