How to play audio cd's on Sun Blade[TM] 1000

Summary :

The cdplayer software looks like it's playing normally (you can see the track being played), but you cannot hear any sound. Normal sound through /dev/audio works fine.

On most systems you can listen to CD audio in a couple of ways. One way is through the headphone jack on the cdrom drive itself. The other is to connect a cable from the back of the cdrom drive and run it internally to the sound card or audio module. Most PC's and some sun-systems (SS-4,5, U-5 and U-10) implement this cable. The problem with the Sun Blade 1000 (and possibly other Sun systems) is that the DVD-ROM that is shipped with it doesn't have a headphone jack. And you can't use the cable method because while there is a cable connection on the back of theDVD-ROM, there is no cable connection on the audio module (part #501-4155).

Because all future Sun Desktops will be configured without this cable, the only way to play audio is to incorporate a cd player application that can play the cd tracks digitally and pass the output through /dev/audio. An updated version of the cd player "xmcd" is such an application that can do this. It can be installed from the Solaris 9 companion CD (SFWxmcd, requires SFWlestf and SFWncur) or can be downloaded from the official xmcd website:

http://www.amb.org/xmcd/