The "digital playback" feature in windows isn't related to the SPDIF output on the drive. Forget about it because it's not relevant to what you're trying to do.

What you should be checking is how to control the volume of the SPDIF input on the sound card, because it sounds like it's either muted or disabled.

raymater wrote on 2024-10-23, 11:13:

I can't enable digital playback on the YAMAHA drive on Windows (i'm using Windows Me). On device manager -> Propreties tab -> Digital CD playback is greyed and checked. I can't enable/disable this checkbox.

That's expected behavior when using VxD drivers. For Creative's cards, you need WDM drivers to enable digital audio over the ATA bus. And those are suboptimal for gaming, so you probably don't want that.

However, since you have a SPDIF connection between your SBLive and your CD-ROM drive, all you need to do is to unmute the "CD Digital" volume slider like so:

This is assuming that the SPDIF cable is properly connected to the CD_SPDIF header on your SBLive. Also, this volume slider is sometimes hidden by default, and you may need to unhide it from the advanced settings menu.

CD Digital and SPDIF In are activated, up and not muted in Play control app.

I have connected and disconnected multiple time the SPDIF cable, invert the sense... Nothing.

So you confirm that WDM drivers are better than VxD drivers?

raymater wrote on 2024-10-23, 11:26:

So you confirm that WDM drivers are better than VxD drivers?

No, the opposite. You want VxD drivers for gaming, WDM drivers were mostly used for music production during the Win9x era.

Note that the digital CD audio pins on certain CD-ROM drives are not connected i.e. they don't work at all. See this thread for more details: Digital CD audio in Windows 98SE greyed out

So I have just tested WDM drivers and... yes digital playback is enabled for both drives. But it stuttering. So quality is clearly not good.

WDM drivers don't support SB16 Emulation for DOS programs (but Windows Me enable SB Pro emulation).

Just realized that Digital SPDIF connection is another thing and don't have a reliable with this digital playback function. But it's an interesting option if you have two CD drives. So I've decided to back to VxD drivers.

* DOS drivers are separated so I'm wrong