) writes:
Hi;

I have Win98SE and have discovered that audio CDs play through the
motherboard. I can unplug the audio cable from the drive and it still
works.

I don't want this, it's an old 400Mhz K6-2 and I want to conserve
resources. Almost all my music plays from MP3s right off of the HD so
I'm not that concerned about the audio quality when playing a CD.

I've looked and looked and I can't seem to find a setting to disable
this function, anyhone know how to do this ? or do I have to use a
crappy old soundcard or CDROM that doesn't support the feature ?
Unfortunately this is not an option, one's a DVD and the burner is a
48X, which surprisingly cranks up to about 29X on data and about 12X on
audio. Crappy old soundcards don't sound so great on MP3s, so I don't
want to screw myself there. If very worse comes to worse should I
consider just buying a cheap CD player ?

Can this be done, and if so how ?

It's the software, as in the operating system.

Time after time, people complain that they don't have sound from
their CDROM when they switch to Linux; "but it worked fine with
Windows". It turns out that the audio cable from the CDROM
drive to the soundcard isn't even installed in many cases, and
nobody notices until they use software that merely uses the IDE
bus to control the drive, not transfer audio CD data.

Since I've never run Windows, I haven't a clue how to fix this,
or even if it can be fixed.

But it has nothing to do with the hardware.

Michael