About the time technology switched to DVDROM drives, playback of audio CDs worked a bit differently. Nowadays the computer reads the audio data directly, and streams that like a music file. This has some advantages, but is not at all supprted by SDL.
It seems times have moved on, but SDL (and Pygame) have not caught up. But this is not so much an issue these days. I can't even remember the last game that used audio cd tracks for sound. I would not recommend this for any new game development.
Tyler Distad wrote:
On a Dell Inspiron E1505 running Ubuntu 8.04 with PyGame 1.8 does not play CD audio as expected. The following code results in the CD track apparently playing, but without audio. The CD spins up for a length of time equaling that of the track length. All other sound functionality on the computer works perfectly.