2 cd-rom with only one able to play audio cds

[Guest_imported]

Hi

I have an NEC cd-rom (master on ide ch2) and a Panasonic cd-rw
(slave) I can play audio cd from the NEC but not the Pana. I have
a Yamaha sound card with several input for the cds. I tried to
connect both cds audio out (at the back of the drive) to the card
but only the NEC works. Is the card suppose to take input from
more than one devices. Of course I did not play two cds at the
same time, only one cd-drive a time .

Further I tried to record some music tracks from an audio cd to
a cd-r. The sound quality is not acceptable. Then I tried to record
to the harddisk first and play it from there. Still very poor quality.
Someone said that I had a cheap sound card. In my mind, the
computer is changing the digitial signal from one format to another
and does not have to go through a D-A, A-D transformation, Is that
what it is?. I have tried a couple of recording software but no
improvement whatsoever.

 

[Guest_imported]

Not being familiar with your soundcard, I cannot be specific, but does your software mixer show more than one input channel for CD audio? Assuming you have not changed the default CD and autoplay settings, if after rebooting the PC you put a music CD in the Panasonic, does the CD-Player software appear on the screen and show tracks playing? If yes but still no sound, try plugging a pair of stereo headphones into the CD's front panel jack. Adjust the front panel volume control to suit. Any sound now?

If you connect the audio lead from the NEC to each of the CD inputs on the soundcard in turn, does each input work successfully and play music? After establishing the NEC works ok on a specific soundcard input, disconnect this audio lead and replace it with the Panasonic lead. Reboot PC. Does the Pana now play music?

Nowadays most CD drives use the same 4 pin connections for audio, i.e. looking at the back of the drive from left to right you have R G G L , where R is righthand channel, G is ground/earth, and L is lefthand channel. Check your connections match the screened cable you're using.

Generally speaking, after you have played a music CD in one drive, the Windows and souncard software, will not "look" at any other CD drive into which a music disk is inserted, unless you reboot the machine to "clear" the settings.

As regards poor quality audio, this can be a number of things. You could be trying to record at too high a level, could be an impedance mismatch somewhere, wrong audio cable, bad or inadequately screened audio lead, or maybe the recording quality set in the soundcard software needs upping from "telephone" quality to "CD audio" quality.

Good luck!


ROGER - GØAOZ.

 

[cdogg]

The sound from music cd's is transferred from the cd-rom directly to the sound card via an audio cable. Unless you have a soundcard like a Sondblaster Live!, most cards only have one input for this cable. This means that normally you can only use one of your cd-rom drives to play music cd's. However, WAV and MP3 files are transferred to the hard drive first, decoded, then played through an interrupt request that travels a different route to your sound card. This is why music cd's might not work, but you can hear music when playing a game from that same drive.

 

[Jesuspower]

You can buy an adapter from cyberguys to have both cd's play music.

http://www.cyberguyys.com

-God Bless

 

[NtelStomper]

For the music audio on the second drive, first look on the sound card and see what the name of the connector you're using is, such as CD Audio, Auxillary..etc.

Double click the speaker icon on the task bar that's by the clock and you'll get to see the volume levels of all the different sound card connectors. Try to find the slide that matches the connector your cable is going to and make sure that the mute box for that sound card connector is not muted.

As for the unacceptable music, all I can say is the lower your audio read speed is, combined with how low your write speed is has the most significant effect on the end result. And you should know that having both drives on the same IDE cable creates more of a data bottle-neck if you're going cd to cd, so you definately might need to lower your speed there if it's audio you're copying.