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Jim Carter's Bugfixes

Music Player Won't Play Audio CDs

James F. Carter
2007-01-22
Symptom:

Launch xmms and ask it to play an audio CD. It sits around for 30 seconds or so, exudes message: alsa mixer timed out, and things go downhill from there depending on how many buttons you've clicked in the meantime. In any case, no sound comes out. In help requests in quite a number of forums I've seen similar behavior reported with other music player frameworks.

What's going on:

Either the default setting or the setting left over from previous configuration attempts specifies analog playback from the CD drive; in other words, there's supposed to be a wire that goes from the drive to the sound card, either from the drive's own headphone jack or an internal cable. The ALSA library is also supposed to be able to find a mixer that can control the playback volume. While older CD drives have all this, it's vaporware on the drive in my laptop. The ALSA library seems to be not too bright about recognizing the lack of a mixer.

message: device default just means that you've configured the ALSA output module to use its default device; it would say message: device hw0,0 if you selected that device in the configuration dialog. As long as the device exists, the message is of no consequence.

How to fix:

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