In xmms there are two ways to play a CD, analog or digitally. You can configure this in the CD Audio Player plugin. gnome-audio does not have the corresponding option. Becuase of this gnome-audio will not work with USB sound devices which require the digital extraction. Posts on the ALSA groups say adding this option to gnome-audio is the only solution. Meanwhile use xmms. The net of this is that it is very difficult for a new user who buys something common like the Microsoft USB speakers to get them working. gnome-audio should add this feature, check the output device and change the CD playback mode automatically.
More info: gnome-audio is written to play CD's assuming that a wire is in place from the CD player to the audio card. This assumption is not correct for USB audio. You can't hook the wire up when you are using USB audio since there is no place to hook the wire to. gnome-audio needs to be modified to bring the audio into the CPU and then send it out via alsa.
This bug has been fixed in Fedora Core 4.
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
The information we've requested above is required in order to review this problem report further and diagnose/fix the issue if it is still present. Since there haven't been any updates to the report in quite a long time now after we've requested additional information, we're assuming the problem is either no longer present in our current OS release, or that there is no longer any interest in tracking the problem. Setting status to "INSUFFICIENT_DATA", however if you still experience this problem after updating to our latest Fedora release and are still interested in Red Hat tracking the issue, and assisting in troubleshooting the problem, please feel free to provide the information requested above, and reopen the report. Thank you in advance.