Today I made some further tweaks to my Amiga 1200 CD-ROM setup.
Modified/cut/spliced an analog audio line out cable (the type you'd otherwise use internally to a PC sound card) to attach phono plugs to 1 end, allowing the CD Audio to output much neater from the back of the now-external IDE drive and thus not requiring a drive with a headphone socket. I just need to get a cheap external mixer, to more properly mix the Amiga + CD Audio sounds, as I don't want to be modding anything internally on the Amiga.
Also removed the CDBoot software and installed Surf Squirrel instead - it's CDTV/CD32 emulation is much better than both CDBoot & IDEFix's CD32 emulator. Now I can just put a CDTV/CD32 disc into the drive and boot/reboot the Amiga straight into the game, with full CD Audio support. Took a lot of web searching & forum reading to figure this all out, but well worth it.
More importantly, since the reinstall of IDEFix + proper configuration, when the DVD drive is switched off and/or disconnected I don't get any errors or notifications in Workbench. This is great, as I won't necessarily always want the drive permanently connected!
I've decided to stick with an IDE DVD-ROM drive, simply because I currently have a bunch of spare DVD-RW discs that I'm finding extremely useful for transferring files between PC & Amiga. Transfer the files, erase and reuse. 😎