suba

i was just messing about with my PC with everything hangout from the case, HDD on the floor and cd drive on top of the case.

the cd drive is only connected with power and EIDE cable. i stick in an audio cd and music started playing! ok, so nothing special or rocket science about it, but dont i need a small cable to connect the cd drive to the soundcard???

just curious as i always had the impression that the cable from the cd drive to the sound card is for audio cd.

p/s OS is windows XP, cd drive is old-ish (1999) and sound card is AWE32.

SD

Yes, it's possible and it's enabled by default in XP. It's called digital audio extraction (I think!) and it does as you've described. Some older drives won't play ball though, so you can disable it. If you're happy with it though leave it on. It's a smart feature.

HTH

Simon.

ptholt

Or on older os just put the cd rom in and plug either headphones or speakers into the headpone socket in front of the cd rom (if it has one).