My Lite-On internal DVD writer no longer reads or writes, new internal (SATA) or external (USB) drive? What is preferred?

[MM]

Bought one 9 months ago. Ruddy marvellous. Cost £4.95, but the price has since increased to £6.95 (but delivery charge reduced).

MM

[Andy Burns]

Rather than being read and decoded to a stereo signal by the drive then fed to a separate input of the soundcard's hardware mixer, the audio tracks are read as data software mixed with any other sounds that are currently playing and fed digitally to the soundcard ...

[John Rumm]

Yup, digital audio extraction over the main bus (SATA or PATA) has been normal for some time now.

[MM]

Amazing! These modern computers are clever! And there's me, religiously, for years, re-connecting the sound cable after every hardware upgrade.

MM

[Johnny B Good]

I used to do the same up until 6 or 7 years ago when I basically lost all interest in the concept of using the optical drive as an audio CD player.

There used to be good reason for using the audio output link if you were routinely using the CDRW as a CD Player simply to audition music CDs whilst sat by your desktop computer. The reason being that the disk was spun at audio playback speed (600 down to 270 rpm) rather than the several thousand rpm when extracting the audio data over the digital interface. It was a less noisy process.