Computer Hope

Anyone know what can cause your music cd's to not play. The disc is loaded but instead of playing it moves to the next track. OR where it normally displays the current track, the numbers shift 1,2,3,4,5,6,...,all the way to the last track.

What operating system are you running and what do you have for a computer for make/model or hardware specs, as well as what player are you using, and is this for all CD's?

Thanks for the reply,
The system is self built, with a PC CHIPS M900 P4 Motherboard. 1.5 Ghz
Intel Tehama 850 Northbridge and Intel 82801BA (ICH2) Southbridge chipsets, combining support for two-channel RAMBUS DRAM (RDRAM), 2X/4X AGP (1.5V only), and the AC 97 codec.

The CD Drive is a pioneer DVR-A18MBK. It was taken from a much newer PC.
Reads other disks OK, but when it comes to some international music titles I used to test the audio, just skips from track to the next, not playing any. Never had that problem before.

If its not clear, the OS is Win98SE. It doesn't have a lot of RAM but I may upgrade to 512 MB. I found out that is the most '98 can address.

One more thing, I did want to mention was that I have two HD's one for backup or another OS which is not used but sitting on the bus. The CD Rom Drive is just one, on the second IDE, and it does work, the jumper is set to master. (Except the music thing)

If it works for some audio discs and not others there must be something unique about the audio discs it does not work with. (I interpreted that it reads other discs OK to refer to other Audio discs, rather than CD-ROM discs)

What software are you using to play these Audio CDs?

No, it does not work with any music cd's. Not even U.S. released disks.

I'd start with swapping out the CD ROM if able to do so.

Do you think that it is a firmware incompatibility. Because I can tell you the drive played music CD's in the system it was installed before, which was a newer Windows 7.

If its jumping from track to track and not sticking on a track then its either the drive itself or software that handles how the drive operates. Since the drive should be good because it worked in the system it  came out of for this other system, what software are you using to play the music CD's?

If it was where you just didnt have audio for a track, I would think it was the older audio stream where a analog audio connection was between a sound card and the CD or DVD ROM. But if its not sticking to tracks and keeps jumping to the next one without any audio then since you claim the drive is healthy it has to be software/driver related in how this drive is operating then and the drive alone cant handle audio CD's without this software/driver support.

Years ago I ran into an issue where CD's were only seen as digital / data and not audio. But my symptoms were not like the one you describe. For me with that problem it was that the disc would be inserted but it would just act like no disc was there because the audio CD wasnt a data disc. When my Offspring - Americana CD had a movies ( music videos ) on it in a data area and then the audio didnt play as normal CD that tipped me off to the fact that the drive was able to see the disc only if it was data, but the audio tracks it didnt know how to deal with. For me the solution was installing iTunes which had a media player that initialized my drive that then allowed playing of the music. The media player that came with Windows couldnt read them alone. But in your situation it sees the tracks, so this is an odd one.

Maybe you can find a old version of iTunes that will play your music through that drive or another legacy player that will initialize the drive properly.

I know it sees the disk, and it tells you how long the tracks are and how long the whole CD is. Its like the play button isn't "wired" right.

what software are you using to play the music CD's?

Just the windows cd player. I tried loading another multimedia program that came with the video card. ATI player. But it does the same thing.

Try Media Monkey...if same results you need a new CD drive...

Lately the drives have an approx lifespan of 2 years.