audio card: too many inputs ?

[Andy Jack]

On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 01:22:30PM +0300, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> How does one handle two cdroms in a system ? Usually there is only one
> plug for the cdrom audio cable on the sound board. Is there a well
> known workaround (that I don't know about) ?

It's difficult for me to formulate a reply based what you don't know, so
I'll just rattle off everything I can think of.

1) $$$ answer: Some sound cards have two; I'm no audiophile so maybe a
new cheap card with two inputs is in order?  I'm looking at a website
for a store that has SB Live! 5.1's for $42 cdn.  If you're looking for
a "real" computer audio solution then you could narrow down the choices
to those with >=2 cd audio inputs.

2) $0.00 non-answer: While you can split one audio _output_ into two
you can't go the other way.  One solution would be to remember which
drive is hooked up to the card via cd audio and that's that.  Or do you
have some need to listen to two CD's at the same time?  Since cd-rom
drives that have "play/stop" buttons and other audio controls work
through analog output (i.e. not #3 below) then if you want to keep this
ability, connect the drive with the controls.

3) $0.00 answer: Digital audio extraction.  Its not just for ripping
CDs.  Depending on how you are playing your music and the abilities of
your cd-rom drives, you can play music via DAE which is then routed
through your sound card as a PCM stream.  XMMS does it, in 1.2.10 the cd
audio plugin lets you choose between analog (i.e., cd audio cable) and
DAE.  This solution is free in terms of money but it's not insignificant
work for a CPU.

4) $1 answer: you could bodge together a cable with a cd audio connector
on one end and a 3.5mm stereo connector on the other end and hook one CD
up to the "line in" on the sound card.  I don't have any idea about
voltages though so this could fry little bits of your sound card, blow
your speakers, or be so quiet as to be useless.

hth,
Andy
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