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cdrom drive as stand-alone cd player?

Hi,

anyone know how to make a normal PC CDROM drive play a standard audio CD (CD-DA), when only a power supply and no IDE cable is connected?

I've tried the simplest

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on three cdrom drives that I happened to get. Power is taken from PC, for now. However it doesn't work, no automatic playback.

As usual the cdroms have only an eject button, volume control, and a headphone jack.

Is there some easy way to make it work?

Or do the current drives require an ATAPI command to start playing?

Reason: I need a simple portable/stand-alone (for demos) serial audio source (MCLK, SCLK, SDATA, LRCLK) with 44.1kHz 16bit stereo to test and debug a prototype of another project. Old PC cdrom drives are abundant and free!!, whereas portable cd players are not ;-))

thanks, - Jan

Reply to
Jan Wagner
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How about getting a cheap CD player from Wal-Mart? I bought a personal cd player from Wal-Mart for my kid the other day for just under $10. Probably only a couple $'s more than what you would spend on parts to get a computer CD drive to work.

Reply to
GotCoffee

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                  Regards ,  SPAJKY ®
   mail addr. @ my site @ http://www.spajky.vze.com 
    "Tualatin OC-ed / BX-Slot1 / inaudible setup!"
Reply to
Spajky

Ah but once the interface are built to make CD-ROM work as stand alone CD player, that interface could be transferred to another CD-ROM when one dies. No cost there as old CD-ROM often turn up for free anyway.

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When you hear the toilet flush, and hear the words "uh oh", it\'s already
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Reply to
Impmon

I got my portable CD player back in the spring for a dollar at a garage sale. And that's likely to become more common as people abandon their portable CD players for MP3 players.

But I thought the issue was you wanted the output of the CDROM player in digital format, for some reason? That's the real determining factor.

But since CD-ROM drives are common and do turn up for free, then all you have to do is keep watching until you find one that will play with no interface. That can go from one taht has a single button but the button serves a dual function, to those that have multiple buttons that allow more control than play and stop.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

Sorry, I have such a cd (seperate button to start/step an audio cd., but it wil not play,when not connected to an IDE cable. Pity because it fitted nicely inside a Sun diskdrive case).

S Burry

Reply to
Sjouke Burry

Thanks everyone!

I did now manage to find a Panasonic(?) CD-R one which has three play/forward, stop and eject buttons, but this has the same problem you said, refuses to play without IDE&PC. Maybe a different drive will work.

I also had more in depth look (IC chips+datasheets and signal traces) at the other "buttonless" drives. There really doesn't seem to be any good way to start audio CD playback automatically, except for replacing the firmware, or writing an "adapter" like in Spajky's link (thanks!).

MuCoP uses PIC16xxx which is a horrendous architecture (IMHO :), and quite an expensive series anyway. But, at least the ATA commands looked amazingly simple. Maybe I'll cook something up for the inexpensive AT89C52 and ATA in 8-bit mode, and put it on the net later on... unless a portable cd player turns up from somewhere...

Thanks again...

- Jan

Reply to
Jan Wagner

Sorry, does not work (even with a unit with play button) it just chewes on the CD a bit ,then quits.

Burry.

Reply to
Sjouke Burry

put the cd in and press play.

pick a cd-rom drive with a play button.

I got an old self-contained CD-rom unit (I think it once lived under a classic mac), it cost me $3. I removed the old scsi cd-rom drive (it had no play button...) and replaced it with a surplus IDE drive (with a play button, headphone jack, volume control etc) fitted RCA sockets to the back and connected them to the analogue out on back of the the cdrom drive and stuck it next to my amplifier and hooked it up, it works great.

also it'll play any media like CDR, and CDRW (not just factory CDs.)

If it doesn't need to be tidy you can hook your drive up to an old PC power supply.

Bye. Jasen

Reply to
Jasen Betts

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