I’ve configured my sound card and I can hear MIDI sounds, system sounds, and, in fact, all sounds except my CD player. The CD is being detected and played, it just can’t be heard. Can anyone help?
Just a thought, but have you tried checking your audio mixer to verify that cd audio is turned up? Or are you getting some sort of error message?
Try aumix from your shell prompt.
Also, CD’s are decoded by DAC’s on the CD player (typically).
Do you have a thin cable going directly from the cd player to the sound card? You need one.
Ya know, it’s times like these I feel like a newbie wondering why whiteout doesn’t work on his 'puter. 
The manual never mentioned that and I wouldn’t have known to search for that command. Thanks for simultaneously getting me to laugh at myself and fixing my problem.
scotth, that’s the fix the manual suggested, and the one I thought of, but I have a Red Hat/Windows ME dual-boot computer and the CD player in Windows works fine. Of course, I opened the case before I tried testing it in Windows (after reclosing the case), but that’s another story… 
Joe_Cool:
It was such a pretty theory…
Nope, no go. I shoved the CD volume up to the max, bothe from the shell and the GUI mixers in both KDE and GNOME. Not one note escaped my speakers from the CD. Since the CD works in Windows, I’m thinking it isn’t a hardware problem, as scotth suggested, but a sound card configuration problem. I must have run that configuration program three times from the shell, and each time I heard the sound. The manual said the program should autodetect the sound card, which it does fine, play a sound sample, which I can always hear, and then play a MIDI sample, which it never does. It exits after I tell it I heard the sound sample. I have, however, successfully played MIDI music, so that must be doing fine. It’s just the CDs that are giving me problems.
I really would like an answer to this question before it slips into Second-Page Oblivion. So come what may, I’m giving it a :: bump :: so when Joe_Cool or someone else wise in the ways of the Red Hat comes around it can be found.
Hope I didn’t insult your intelligence with first theory. You didn’t mention it worked under another OS, so, I thought it was worth checking.
Next piece of info I would really like to know it what brand and model sound card you are running.
Also, what brand/model sound card does the auto detect program say it found?
scotth, I’m insulting my intelligence right now. I’ll tell you why.
Knowing that Windows can play CDs just fine (something my OP should have mentioned), I booted it and checked what it had listed as my sound card:
SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio
This looks familiar, thought I. It was. Why?
Because it’s the information I entered when I installed Linux with my own two hands not a month ago!
I’m not blonde, I’m not blind, I’m just really, really out of it on some things.
The sound card configuration program I ran last weekend said I have a VIA Technologies|AC97 Sound Controller. Maybe it’s right, too. Maybe sound controllers are different from sound cards. I don’t know. But I do know that Windows can play CDs, Linux can’t, Windows mentions SoundMAX, and Linux mentions VIA.
So help me. Should I manually select my sound card to make it match what Windows says?
Ok,
Soundmax is a chip solution made by Analog Devices. They don’t make sound cards, just the chips used on them.
They don’t provide drivers for their chipset directly. You need to figure out what brand card it is and see if you can get some support from them.
The correct linux drivers will say they are Soundmax or Analog Devices.
My GUESS is that AC97 is not the right driver.
http://www.driverforum.com may be a good source if you can’t get anything from the manufacturer of the card.