playing CDROM music questions

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

I wish to play cdrom music discs from an exterrnal USB CDROM drive. It 
is the Rioddas drive recomended for linux.

I find that often (such as wiki.debian.org/CDDVD) I'm told to mount 
the cdrive. But I can play cds without mounting. Wny is mounting 
sometimes recommended?

I wanted to use aplay to play music on cdrom, but have concluded 
it cannot be done in any straightforward way. Why not?

The mplayer command $ mplayer -cdrom-device /dev/sr0 cdda:// works. On 
my system it relies on alsa. However, about every 15 seconds the the 
process stops for about one second ane the drive LED flashes on. In 
the mplayer configuration I do D not see anything about buffer size.

To simplify my life, I created a ~/scripts/play file. It is in my 
PATH. The file has this content:

  #!/bin/sh

  mplayer /dev/sr0 cdda://

  exit 0

But the $ play command only returns the aplay -help info. Why won't 
the script work?

-- 

     Haines Brown