CD audio from your PC CDRom typically goes over an analog cable to your built-in Soundblaster-compatable card. To use a professional audio card, you will need to go digitally from the CDRom through the computer to the audio card, as long as it supports standard MME or WDM drivers (all of the cards we sell do). Several programs support this; including Windows Media Player 7 and Winamp (with a plugin). This will take up a stereo pair of outputs while the cd is playing, but will produce higher quality reproduction of the CDs (you'll notice it immediately) because of the higher-quality D/A (digital to analog) converters.

If you have Windows Media Player 7, go to Tools, Options, CD Audio, and turn on Digital Playback. This will tell Media Player to read the CD digitally and output audio cds to whatever audio output is selected in your multimedia properties in the Windows control panel.

If you have Winamp, go to their homepage, search for input plugins, download a CD reader or CDDA plugin (search the input plugins on the website), and install it to your winamp\plugins directory. Then, make sure Winamp is set to use your pro-audio card as an output. This will also allow you to use EQ and any other audio plugins in real time.

One potential problem in using this method is with some of the new copy-protected CDs. There may potentially be a problem in getting this to work since using this method of playback is essentially the same as "ripping" a CD track to a file, but with most CDs on the market, this shouldn't be a problem.

Several other programs do the same job: Music Match Jukebox, Sonic Foundry's Siren, and many other mp3 players.