The audio connector is connected. The cd spins up when I go to winamp source and pick the drive I want to play the audio from. Then in a split second, all the tracks populate and I can hear noises from the drive so I know it's loading the tracks. but when I hit play nothing happens and the busy light remains off and silent.
Does the computer detect whether there's a connection between the CD-ROM and the sound card and then refuse to play cds if absent or does it always play but you just wouldn't hear anything if the wire wasn't there? I'd like to understand if this is a cable problem or if it's some sort of driver or OS setup issue.
it should always play. it does not detect if an audio cable is present or not.
Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Do not ask Why !
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Serial_port
So if it doesn't... it's a software issue? I've tried different players. Is there some CD audio codec I need to install? I think that'd be part of WinAmp already. Heck it should be part of windows already.
Anyone have any guidance on this? I'm trying to diagnose before the 30 day return runs out...
There are two ways of playing audio CDs. In the old fashioned way, the drive plays directly to the audio connector and/or the headphone jack on the front. If you're playing the CD that way, software on your computer doesn't really matter - for as long as the drive receives the instruction to start playing, that's it. And actually, there were some drives that had buttons to start playing audio CDs on their own, so if you had one of those, you didn't even need the software.
Eventually, as CD-ROM drives started to be able to do digital audio extraction, that way got replaced by the more modern way where effectively, the software on your computer rips the audio CD through the drive and then plays it through the normal software stack. Trying to remember when that first became a thing; I think by Windows XP, that had become the standard approach, the internal audio connector and the headphone jack vanished (or, in the case of the internal audio connector, stopped being used - I think most motherboards with onboard audio for a number of years in the 2000s continued to have the connector), and that was that.
I would suggest that you need to figure out which of the two approaches you are trying to do. My guess is that Winamp is probably trying to do the second kind; it's new enough, not to mention has built-in ripping capabilities, so... that'd be my guess.
What Windows/WinAmp version are you using? If the drive can even read CD-Rs then there aren't many reasons why it wouldn't play audio CDs, other than a problem with the CD audio cable connection or the player trying to stream the audio data through the IDE cable, bypassing internal the audio cable.
I suggest you do the following:
Ok let me try the dos method first and report back.
I want to do the direct cable method but I'm trying to determine if a disconnected or broken cable connection would prevent the drive from "trying" to play anyway (ie. whether you'd see disc activity or not). I am not seeing disk activity beyond the indexing of the tracks but yes the CDR works and yes it copies data files just fine. I think the socket for the audio cable may be damaged though. Trying to know how one could diagnose that.
Gahhhrrrlic wrote on 2023-07-08, 22:23:Ok let me try the dos method first and report back.
I want to do the direct cable method but I'm trying to determine if a disconnected or broken cable connection would prevent the drive from "trying" to play anyway (ie. whether you'd see disc activity or not). I am not seeing disk activity beyond the indexing of the tracks but yes the CDR works and yes it copies data files just fine. I think the socket for the audio cable may be damaged though. Trying to know how one could diagnose that.
I would think that you'd see disc activity - I don't think the drive knows if it has the audio cable vs doesn't have the audio cable. Trying to remember... I had a CD-ROM drive without the cable for like a year in the 1990s, and my sense is that it still behaved as if the cable was plugged in, you just didn't get any sound out the sound card.
My guess - your software is trying to do the newer digital extraction method and the drive/controller/etc doesn't support it.
DOS works! So it looks like the cable isn't the issue. Rather there's something screwy going on in windows. I see and R and an S drive, which doesn't make any sense. The R drive is the correct one but the S drive is the one the CD player says has all the tracks on it (yet it doesn't play). What in blazes could cause that to happen?
Gahhhrrrlic wrote on 2023-07-09, 05:03:DOS works! So it looks like the cable isn't the issue. Rather there's something screwy going on in windows. I see and R and an S drive, which doesn't make any sense. The R drive is the correct one but the S drive is the one the CD player says has all the tracks on it (yet it doesn't play). What in blazes could cause that to happen?
If I am following your posts correctly, this is a Mitsumi 4X drive. Ignoring the fact for a second that I have a vague recollection Mitsumi drives didn't have the best reputation back in the day, that would be a drive from, oh, 1995 or so. Maybe later 1994.
Is there any reason to believe that a drive from 1995 would support digital audio extraction? Assuming this is IDE/ATAPI, 1995 is very early at the beginning of the history of ATAPI - I know I had an ATAPI 2x Sony CD-ROM in early 1995 and at the time, that was unusual, most CD-ROMs were SCSI or some proprietary interface on a sound card (Creative supported a couple). So I would not expect those drives to have all the feature sets that drives would have had by the turn of the millennium. I am trying to remember when drives first started losing their headphone jacks - that would have been the time that digital audio extraction would have been well-established.
Try a player that you know doesn't use digital audio extraction, e.g. Windows 95's built in CD player app, in Windows and see what happens.
VivienM wrote on 2023-07-09, 14:58:If I am following your posts correctly, this is a Mitsumi 4X drive. Ignoring the fact for a second that I have a vague recollect […]
Gahhhrrrlic wrote on 2023-07-09, 05:03:DOS works! So it looks like the cable isn't the issue. Rather there's something screwy going on in windows. I see and R and an S drive, which doesn't make any sense. The R drive is the correct one but the S drive is the one the CD player says has all the tracks on it (yet it doesn't play). What in blazes could cause that to happen?
If I am following your posts correctly, this is a Mitsumi 4X drive. Ignoring the fact for a second that I have a vague recollection Mitsumi drives didn't have the best reputation back in the day, that would be a drive from, oh, 1995 or so. Maybe later 1994.
Is there any reason to believe that a drive from 1995 would support digital audio extraction? Assuming this is IDE/ATAPI, 1995 is very early at the beginning of the history of ATAPI - I know I had an ATAPI 2x Sony CD-ROM in early 1995 and at the time, that was unusual, most CD-ROMs were SCSI or some proprietary interface on a sound card (Creative supported a couple). So I would not expect those drives to have all the feature sets that drives would have had by the turn of the millennium. I am trying to remember when drives first started losing their headphone jacks - that would have been the time that digital audio extraction would have been well-established.
Try a player that you know doesn't use digital audio extraction, e.g. Windows 95's built in CD player app, in Windows and see what happens.
But... but... that's not what I want/did/said.
I'm not interested in digital audio extraction. I did try Windows' built in cd player. The problem is that Windows is creating 2 drives when there should be only 1 so I suspect the mapping is wrong and that's why it won't play? It's just a theory but I know the cable isn't the issue now since DOS works fine.
When I try to use the CD player in W95, it sees 2 drives, R and S. R is assigned in my autoexec so that's the real one. S... I dunno where that came from, yet it seems to have all the tracks on it. If you hit play, nothing happens. If you select R, it says there's nothing in R. It's quite bizarre. Is the drive getting mapped twice or something?
Gahhhrrrlic wrote on 2023-07-09, 23:42:But... but... that's not what I want/did/said. […]
VivienM wrote on 2023-07-09, 14:58:If I am following your posts correctly, this is a Mitsumi 4X drive. Ignoring the fact for a second that I have a vague recollect […]
Gahhhrrrlic wrote on 2023-07-09, 05:03:DOS works! So it looks like the cable isn't the issue. Rather there's something screwy going on in windows. I see and R and an S drive, which doesn't make any sense. The R drive is the correct one but the S drive is the one the CD player says has all the tracks on it (yet it doesn't play). What in blazes could cause that to happen?
If I am following your posts correctly, this is a Mitsumi 4X drive. Ignoring the fact for a second that I have a vague recollection Mitsumi drives didn't have the best reputation back in the day, that would be a drive from, oh, 1995 or so. Maybe later 1994.
Is there any reason to believe that a drive from 1995 would support digital audio extraction? Assuming this is IDE/ATAPI, 1995 is very early at the beginning of the history of ATAPI - I know I had an ATAPI 2x Sony CD-ROM in early 1995 and at the time, that was unusual, most CD-ROMs were SCSI or some proprietary interface on a sound card (Creative supported a couple). So I would not expect those drives to have all the feature sets that drives would have had by the turn of the millennium. I am trying to remember when drives first started losing their headphone jacks - that would have been the time that digital audio extraction would have been well-established.
Try a player that you know doesn't use digital audio extraction, e.g. Windows 95's built in CD player app, in Windows and see what happens.
But... but... that's not what I want/did/said.
I'm not interested in digital audio extraction. I did try Windows' built in cd player. The problem is that Windows is creating 2 drives when there should be only 1 so I suspect the mapping is wrong and that's why it won't play? It's just a theory but I know the cable isn't the issue now since DOS works fine.
When I try to use the CD player in W95, it sees 2 drives, R and S. R is assigned in my autoexec so that's the real one. S... I dunno where that came from, yet it seems to have all the tracks on it. If you hit play, nothing happens. If you select R, it says there's nothing in R. It's quite bizarre. Is the drive getting mapped twice or something?
What happens if you remove/comment out MSCDEX from autoexec.bat and the driver from config.sys? I may be the wrong person for this since I haven't touched Win9x in 23 years or so (so someone else please jump in), but my recollection is that Win95 has 32-bit drivers for CD-ROMs and doesn't actually need the MSCDEX in autoexec.bat once it's started up Windows. (If you want to use DOS mode that's a different story, which is why most Win95 systems do have the DOS drivers set up)
I'm guessing that what's happening is that whatever mechanism is supposed to disable the DOS drivers on R isn't working just quite right and the Win95 drivers, meanwhile, are loading on S:. But whether that is affecting your audio CD playing or not, who knows...
Also, there's a place in the System control panel, I think on the last tab, where it tells you if it's running any 16-bit drivers. What is it showing you?
I think I found the problem at least although I'm not able to fix it yet.
The Mitsumi driver seems to have re-written my autoexec and config to load its own driver. However, it seems to be loading 2 devices instead of 1. I tried removing the 2nd reference and now there's only 1 drive showing in windows but... it won't play cd music. So I guess I got it wrong.
I know what the syntax should look like if I'm just using a universal driver like xdvd2.sys or whatever it is, but with Mitsumi's driver, does anyone know the correct syntax for config and autoexec?