Technical note: I took a CD to my computer some time ago, and found it wouldn't play in the built-in CD/DVD. It appears that newer CD/DVD drives for computers sometimes lack the internal firmware to play CDs as audio, but only for extracting data; the giveaway is the lack of a headphone socket on the front. Presumably this makes the drive cheaper, as the audio firmware is licensed. (I've no idea whether or not there's open-source software to bridge this gap.)

Upshot: to get audio CDs to play on my newer computer, I'll need to transplant the CD drive from the older system, or buy an external drive which is audio-CD literate. Sigh.

Hope this helps.