audio cd problems (RH8.0 and Gnome2.0)

[Brendan McEnaney <mcenaney world std com>]

Hi,

I find myself unable to play audio cd's since moving from
RedHat 7.3 --> 8.0 and Gnome 1.4 --> 2.0. I had no problem
with this function before the upgrade.  Every other type of
audio app works fine: mp3's, games, realaudio all work. I can
open an audio cd in Gnome Toaster and drag individual tracks
to the "Play" button and that works but all cd players like the
'gnome cd applet', 'gnome cd player' and 'grip' read the disk, show
the tracks and indicate progress... but no sound comes out. I
even tried 'playcd -c /dev/cdrom1' on the console and it seems
to be reading the disk (activity light on the drive is lit) but again,
no sound.

I have 2 scsi cd drives: a Plextor PlexWriter is /dev/scd0 or
/dev/cdrom and a Panasonic which is /dev/scd1 or /dev/cdrom1.
Both are recognized by all players, tracks are read... but no sound.
Both drives mount and do their thing with data cdroms flawlessly.

/dev/dsp looks like the following (is this right?):
crw-------    1 mcenaney root      14,   3 Aug 30 19:31 /dev/dsp

Soundcard is a Soundblaster es1370 Audio PCI and, like I said,
works fine with everything else and played audio cd's fine before
upgrading. I've checked the physical connections from drive to
soundcard which are fine. All the mixer settings are right where
they ought to be. <sigh>

I'm stumped. Can anyone help? Is anyone having a similar problem?

Thank's in advance for any help.

--
Brendan McEnaney
http://www.theworld.com/~mcenaney