Can't read ANY audio cd

Question

Couple of weeks ago my laptop battery died, literally, when I was listening an audio cd. The drive made an unhealthy noise and stopped. After connecting to AC, Arch was fine but no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to read an audio cd. None of the media players recognized it. It seemed as if the drive was empty. Data cd's etc. work just fine. Audio cd's also work fine in Windows.
I've searched Google, this forum, other forums, asked on IRC etc. Nobody seems to have an idea. Any ideas?

Answer 1

dcc24 wrote:
Yeah, I still have the problem.It seems to be limited to audio cd's.
I've just successfully burned a cd and I can open it on a different system. I don't think it's a hardware issue though, since I can read audio cd's in Windows.
Whoops, I should have read your first post more carefully!
Three basic suggestions:
Make sure you are in the group audio - gpasswd -a user audio - as root. I know, you've already added yourself to audio, but I experienced a self-imposed system crash and found that afterwards my permissions were all screwed up, and they seemed to be a little 'flaky' afterwards. Didn't work? Move to suggestion 2:
Open whatever media player you are using with a terminal. Try using an audio cd. Make sure the media player is directing to cdda. Check for any errors in the output. No? Suggestion 3:
Completely remove the media players you have used, including the configuration files that pacman won't delete. Re-install a media player you are sure worked before. Does it work? If yes, it was simply the result of a config file that was corrupted with the power loss.
Still not working? Then:
You said the media players were acting as if the 'drive was empty'. Do you mean that in the sense that they are not even detecting the cd, that they are giving you an error that when you try and use an audio cd, or in the sense that they are 'playing' the cd, but there is no output?