HOWTO: Fix Audio CD Playback in KDE Apps

Posted on February 16, 2007

I recently reformatted my Kubuntu partition and reinstalled the OS from scratch.  Just about everything went fine, except that suddenly all my KDE applications (like Amarok, and the audiocd kio-slave) were unable to read audio CDs.

After much digging I found the solution. Go into the KDE Control Center and, under the "Sound and Multimedia" category, choose "Audio CDs". The first option in that dialog is labeled "Specify CD Device", and it’s where the path to your CD drive should be. Kubuntu had provided the path as "/media/cdrom0", which is the default mount point for the first CD drive in a system. But for some reason KDE doesn’t like it if you give it the mount point; it wants the actual name of the device that was mounted there. I replaced it with "/dev/hdc" and all the problems went away.

Just thought I’d share, in case anyone else runs into this issue down the road…