CD Drive headphone jack. Why?

[Cheetah8799]

Ok, I admit it, I have never used the headphone jack on the front of my CD drive. And in all honesty in the hundreds of computers i have built or worked on I have never tested it, nor have I had a client ask me about it.

I just built a system for somebody and they are asking why it doesn't work. "I don't know" I told him. But I said I'd find out. The drive is a Lite-On 48x24x28 CDRW. I have the audio cable from the drive to the sound card, and it plays music just fine through the speakers, but he wants to plug his headphones into the CD drive because the cable won't reach the back of the system.

So, how to I get the darn sound to come out the jack on the CDRW??? Am I missing something here, or should it just work?

thanks in advance.

 

[thorin]

It should just work. It 'may' only work if you push play (play/pause) on the CDROM and don't have Windows accessing the drive (ie: It can only be sending Audio to it's own front panel or the output on the back of the unit).

Why not just purchase a $3 6' stereo headphone extension cable at RadioShack just to get him out of your hair. (Is there no headphone jack on his speakers?)

Thorin

 

[Vic]

It just works, no sound card required.

 

[Cheetah8799]

ok, I'll pass the info along.

I did think of the extension cable. I think that's what I'll tell him if he can't get it to work. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing something wrong...

 

[Cabana]

It should work from in windows - most cdroms don't even have play buttons on the front, only eject. Plug it in and load up something that plays CD audio and you'll see.

 

[CZroe]

Back in the day, some games used the PC speaker for sound effects and the CD-ROM for music. So if you wanted to listen to that music with headphones, you had no soundcard to plug into. Many of the first sound cards included IDE controllers built-in with a CD-ROM in a "Multimedia Bundle" and the CD-ROMs audio output was just piped out the back to the line-in on the sound card. Of course, only today we are finally phazing out the internal audio cable, but many DOS games will still need them if they don't work in XP. I have no idea why they kept the headphone jack around for so long. For a long time a "next track" button was commonly added next to the eject button so you could start and play a CD with limited functionality without software. Pushing "Play" on Win95's CD Player and setting the "continue playing on exit" option will continue to output CD audia for those without the button.

 

[Texun]

Does it work with an audio CD? That's all they will do. They don't receive audio from the board or sound card. Example: You can't play an MP3 from your hard drive and listen through the headphone jack.

Looks like I read your post too quickly but the question is still valid in a way. What was he listening to when the CDR was connected to the sound card? If he was listening to an audio CD through his speakers via a jumper to the sound card input then it would work, if he then tried to listen to a file on the hard drive through the CDR jack it wouldn't pass back through the CDR jack.

 

[Syborg1211]

This could be a stupid question, but is the volume knob on the front of the drive set all the way up?

 

[Broadkipa]

Thats what I was going to say, volume control, gotta be prime suspect!

 

[Cheetah8799]

well, I never got far enough to ask him if the volume control was not turned up... I just told him to go buy an extension cable for his headphones, and he was fine with that.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: CZroe
Back in the day, some games used the PC speaker for sound effects and the CD-ROM for music. So if you wanted to listen to that music with headphones, you had no soundcard to plug into. Many of the first sound cards included IDE controllers built-in with a CD-ROM in a "Multimedia Bundle" and the CD-ROMs audio output was just piped out the back to the line-in on the sound card. Of course, only today we are finally phazing out the internal audio cable, but many DOS games will still need them if they don't work in XP. I have no idea why they kept the headphone jack around for so long. For a long time a "next track" button was commonly added next to the eject button so you could start and play a CD with limited functionality without software. Pushing "Play" on Win95's CD Player and setting the "continue playing on exit" option will continue to output CD audia for those without the button.

Speaking of which, at one time I had an older CD-ROM drive with the "next track" button that you speak of. It had been pulled from an old non-working AT formfactor system (the motherboard had died, but the PSU still worked), and I set it on the table all by itself, connected only to the lone AT PSU. I plugged in one connector from the PSU to the CD-ROM, and the power cord into the socket, and turned on the PSU by the little button on the switch cable. Thus, I was able to play a music CD in the CD-ROM without having said CD-ROM hooked up to a real computer at all. It was kind of cool, IMHO. Oh well, sorry for wasting your time with this stupid little anecdotal story.