USB CD drive won't play audio CDs

[Juergen Lock]

In article <19680.6348.587693.845415 at yeti.mininet> you write:
>Markus Hoenicka writes:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm making progress towards getting most out of my TravelMate
> > 8371. Lots of things work, but I ran into a problem with my external
> > CD drive, a Sony DRX-S77U DVD/CD rewritable drive. I can boot off this
> > drive, and I can mount data CDs without a problem. However, I don't
> > seem to be able to play audio CDs on this drive.
> > 
>
>I've collected a little more data on that problem. First, I've plugged
>in the external CD drive into another laptop running FreeBSD:
>
>FreeBSD yeti.mininet 8.0-STABLE FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE #2: Fri Mar 12
>22:29:46 CET 2010     root at yeti.mininet:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
>i386
>
>This laptop has a builtin CD/DVD burner which plays audio CDs without
>a hitch. However, the external one fails with similar error
>messages. The problems seem to be related to the fact that the
>external drive is connected via USB, whereas the internal one is an
>ATAPI drive. Also, the problem is not specific to amd64 but occurs on
>i386 as well.
>
>Next, I've plugged this drive into yet another laptop running Debian
>Linux. The drive was recognized in an instant, and I was able to play
>audio CDs. This means that the external CD drive is not defective.
>
>I know that FreeBSD isn't the multimedia OS of choice, but is there a
>general problem reading audio CDs from USB drives? Is there a chance
>that this problem is drive-specific? If yes, can anyone recommend a
>drive that works?

Hi!

 In your other post you talk about testing audio playback using
cdcontrol play...  the problem with that is it depends on a
drive's internal audio hw, whose output may not be connected (likely
a headphone jack in case of an external drive) or it may even be
nonexistant as I suspect is the case with your drive because of
the errors you get.  The more `modern' way to play audio cds is
to use digital audio extraction (dae) over the ata/usb/scsi bus
and play that using the computer's own soundcard, I usually test
that via mplayer whose port I build with the cdparanoia OPTION:

	mplayer -cache 8192 -cdrom-device /dev/cdX cdda://

 You also need to make sure cdparanoia can access the drive's
/dev/cdX and /dev/passY devices - you can find the corresponding
passY device by running camcontrol devlist.  If you want to test
extracting a track to a file instead of directly playing it you
can run:

	cdparanoia -d /dev/cdX 1

 Note:  I haven't actually tested this with an usb drive, maybe
cdparanioa needs to be patched for those too like it needs for the
new cam/ata code:

	http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=142049

 (And I'm sure you can find other audio players in ports that can
do dae, I just usually rip audio cds instead of playing them
directly.)

 HTH,
	Juergen

PS:  I see you're a geek too! :)  I didn't know this particular
`AQ' test before, took it (as linked from wikipedia), and my score
is 37...