the corner office

For posterity and Google.

I wanted to listen to a CD on my Gentoo box, and ran into some issues. Goes to show when last I listened to a CD, instead of mp3s.

First-up, gnome-cd (the Gnome CD Player), gave me the useful message "Drive Error". First stop was drive permissions, which is a common problem according to Google. The symlink /dev/cdrom had full read/write/execute permissions, but the underlying drive my CD is attached to, /dev/hdb, did not. Fixed that with chmod a+rwx /dev/hdb. The x and w seem redundant, but that's what the symlink had, so I did the same.

That solved part 1. After that, gnome-cd just crashed whenever I tried to open it. Trick whenever things go wrong is to run from the command line, so you get the stderr output. I was getting this:

colin@mirkwood ~ $ gnome-cd

** (gnome-cd:2368): WARNING **: No GConf default audio sink key and osssink doesn't work

** ERROR **: file gst-cdparanoia-cdrom.c: line 291 (build_pipeline): assertion failed: (priv->audio_sink != 0)
aborting...

Found this post on the Gentoo forums, all I needed to do was go to Preferences > MultiMedia Systems Selector, and change the default sink from 'osssink' to 'alsasink'.

After changing that, voila.