Music Player Won't Play Audio CDs

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:

• Type control-P in xmms' main window to open the preferences dialog.
• In the first tab, Audio I/O Plugins, in the top half find CD Audio Player in the listbox and click on it.
• Now click on Configure just below (input configure, not output configure). A new dialog box opens.
• Select the Device tab if not already showing. In the next row select the tab for the CD drive you use for music playback, if there's more than one.
• If you're in the same boat I was, you have Play Mode = Analog. Change it to Digital Audio Extraction. The choices for the volume control will become gray.
• Just for paranoia, you could put media in the drive and hit Check Drive. Give it 30 seconds or so to do its test. It reports the result in a separate window.
• Click on OK, then Close in the preferences dialog and your problems should be solved. As a side effect, the spectrum analyser or other selected visualization feature will now work.