Last month I upgraded my computer with new parts. I kept my old DVD drive that I mainly use to rip CDs. I have now however run into an issue that has stumped me. When I tried to rip some used CDs I bought the resulting FLACs had a terrible crackle, making them unlistenable. So I started looking into the issue and tried different ripping programs and CD players. Trying to play a CD also produces a crackle with most players. Some players can’t even see my CD drive. I have installed rippers and players from distro repos and flatpaks and it makes no difference. I have even tried booting into live environments of different distros and the problem persists.
Now, the real kicker for me is that VLC (from flathub or distro repos) plays and rips the CDs with no issues. VLC is not a great tool for my purposes however. EDIT: Kaffeine flatpak also plays CDs without issue.
There are no error messages (aside from some players which can’t even see the drive) to go off of. Google has failed me. CD error correction makes no difference, just makes ripping terribly slow. Some attempts to fiddle with pipewire also produced no result. Encoders work fine when encoding from different sources, so they are probably not the problem, and the same issue happens when playing the CDs.
On my old setup this worked fine. I can also watch DVDs without trouble.
Does anyone have any idea where to go from here? If it wasn’t for VLC I’d think this is a hardware issue, but now I’ve no real idea. I’m currently on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I assume there’s a data cable running from your optical drive to the motherboard. Check that it’s undamaged and firmly seated at both ends, because this kind of sounds like a bad connection (which some players might be able to compensate for with filters). Even if you didn’t replace the cable or the mobo, you might have unseated one end while you were messing around inside the case.
I tried a different SATA cable and there’s no change. Thanks for the suggestion.