You don't have to connect it if you don't want to. If you play a music CD in the drive, you won't get audio if you don't connect it. Just connect it to the one that you would normally play audio in, or games that use music tracks.

 

Thank. One more question thougth, which drive is faster and better?

16X40 DVD Drive @ ATA 33
or
20x10x40 CDRW Drive @ PIO 4

 

ATA 33 would make the DVD faster IMHO.

 

I think the DVD might be faster(of course, you have to check the quality of each one of them), since the PIO4 mode is kinda old and takes much more resources than the DMA(ATA 33) mode.

 

Yep. I would pick the DVD player.

 

I'm pretty sure WindowsXP uses a digital music extraction routine. So, even if you don't connect the cables, it'll still play. Maybe ME is the same way...I dunno...I don't use it...

 

yeah win xp doesn't require any audio cables to be hooked up. But your cd player will have to support digital audio extraction. Check in control panel -> system -> (hardware tab) device manager -> and choose the cd rom drive in the cd rom tab. If you can check off "enable digital audio from this cd-rom device" in the properties tab, you don't need to connect the audio cable to listen to cd music.