Hello, Jack. Thanks for the reply!
On Sat, Jan 03, 2026 at 15:33:43 -0500, Jack wrote: > On 2026.01.03 11:44, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 15:44:06 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: [ .... ] > > > I think I am just going to buy a new drive. At ~25 Euros, it's > > > just not worthwhile trying all these things on the current one. > > Well, I've bought and installed a new drive (made by ASUS) and it > > hasn't helped in the slightest. :-( > > Maybe modern DVD drives just aren't capable of reading audio CDs > > properly. > It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I've successfully read audio CDs > with a DVD reader. Can you find any documentation on the specific > drive model you just bought? Well, things have taken a turn for the better! I've discovered the program xine, which plays audio CDs faultlessly. :-) Maybe I'm kidding myself, but the sound quality seems better even than the sections without crackle on deadbeef. So it's not my hardware which is at fault. Looking at the C source code for xine, it seems it uses direct ioctl calls to the kernel to read data from the CD. deadbeef instead uses dev-libs/libcdio for this. Maybe there's some incompatibility between libcdio and my hw/sw setup. I will be trying to pin this down in the coming days/weeks. > As a temporary workaround, you might consider copying the entire > content of the CD to a folder, then play from local storage instead of > directly from the disk. I've done this in the past with VLC, but just > using a file browser should show each track as some sort of audio file. I haven't tried this yet, but I intend to do so this afternoon (European time). Thanks for the suggestion. [ .... ] > Jack -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
