No Audio from CD - Software not Hardware

[IvanEBC]

Hiya Folks

Returned from retro Computer show, got inspired to installed a DVD player into my Amiga 4000D - did that, struggled but did succeed to install IDEfox97. Tested with a windows DVD, CD0: showed me some text file about wrong format, that's okay, i believe its working.

I tried the PlayCD that comes with idefix and found, the gui seem to have moving numbers, my drive lights up, i get an icon saying CD0: CDDA on workbench, but there is no actual audio playing.

Searching didn't find much but saw groovyplayer mentioned, so i installed that, again, gui seems active, all the correct tracks are recognised, it skips and jumps to the right tracks when requested but there is no audio.

Played a module from eagleplayer - audio DOES work.

Any ideas what might be missing here to get the audio to come out the speakers, readme of programs offers no help for this, only actual errors, and i get NO error.

Amiga 4000
KS 3.1
WB 3.1

EDIT 1: Found a fredFish CD - worked perfectly.
EDIT 2: Found a forum suggesting you can't do it natively and need some mod from the CD audio plug to the Amiga, like the old Win 95 to soundcard 4 pin plug. But then don't some games use CD audio?

Thanks

[thomas]

Most CD player programs for the Amiga simply send a PLAY AUDIO SCSI command to the drive and the drive then plays the CD audio through its analog outputs. This can be a headphone connector on the front or the four-pin sound card connector on the back.

The latter can be connected to the A4000's motherboard. There is a three-pin connector somewhere near the back. If you use a standard 4-pin cable the motherboard connector needs to be bent a bit. (4-pin is Left-GND-GND-Right, Amiga is Left-GND-Right)

If you don't connect the analog audio, your only choice is reading digital data from the drive and playing back through Amiga's audio chip. There are only a few programs which can do this and there is no game among them.

I've been working on a wrapper cdda.device driver for a while which takes the PLAY AUDIO commands and then starts reading digital audio from the drive and plays it through AHI. This would make CD audio available in games without an analog connection. But it uses quite a lot of CPU% which the game might lack.

[IvanEBC]

Originally Posted by thomas

Most CD player programs for the Amiga simply send a PLAY AUDIO SCSI command to the drive and the drive then plays the CD audio through its analog outputs. This can be a headphone connector on the front or the four-pin sound card connector on the back.

The latter can be connected to the A4000's motherboard. There is a three-pin connector somewhere near the back. If you use a standard 4-pin cable the motherboard connector needs to be bent a bit. (4-pin is Left-GND-GND-Right, Amiga is Left-GND-Right).

There an Image of this somewhere so i can get it right?

If you don't connect the analog audio, your only choice is reading digital data from the drive and playing back through Amiga's audio chip. There are only a few programs which can do this and there is no game among them.

TBH - i'd really only want it for playing Music Discs, but i assume some games might use it down the track now i finally for this working.

I've been working on a wrapper cdda.device driver for a while which takes the PLAY AUDIO commands and then starts reading digital audio from the drive and plays it through AHI. This would make CD audio available in games without an analog connection. But it uses quite a lot of CPU% which the game might lack.

For just playing a CD, i'm happy to test it out.

[IvanEBC]

Might have found it.

And i even found a brand new CD Audio cable... so looking down on the drive that is also FACING me... the pins are WHITE | Blank | BLACK | RED

So i only need 3 pins - middle is the BLACK i think, so i guess i can move the cable to the blank hole so no bending is required.
So looing from the front.. towards the back of the Amiga .. am i doing

RED | BLACK | WHITE
or WHITE | BLACK | RED

Just realised, this is no longer a Software post.

I think i'm wasting your time, sorry, if i remove the blank so the 3 pins are together, i can't really get it wrong, if the left and right is wrong, i just pull it out and switch it around.
Brain is slowing kicking into gear

[IvanEBC]

and it works .... but the sound is low (lucky my speakers turn up loud but i BEST remember to to turn tham down afterwards or risk blowing speakers/windows/eardrums.
I'm sure you veterans know this but for anyone new - yeah this is common and i found a solution but i'm not replacing parts of my board.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!ms...U/eH0BWhY3zqsJ

[daxb]

You can also try CDDA-Filesystem what gives you a volume that contains audio files (RAW, AIFF or WAVE) for each audio track on CD. Supported are MMC compatible CD drives and older SCSI drives from Toshiba, NEC, Philips and NEC. The audio files can be played by many players over Paula or a soundcard. Paula quality is not as good as soundcard but with 14 bit + cybersound calibration it becomes better.

[IvanEBC]

Originally Posted by daxb

You can also try CDDA-Filesystem what gives you a volume that contains audio files (RAW, AIFF or WAVE) for each audio track on CD. Supported are MMC compatible CD drives and older SCSI drives from Toshiba, NEC, Philips and NEC. The audio files can be played by many players over Paula or a soundcard. Paula quality is not as good as soundcard but with 14 bit + cybersound calibration it becomes better.

Thank you, i'll look at it (just grabbed from Aminet)