Reading CDs on SteamOS — Kevin Østerkilde

Plug a USB optical drive into a Steam Deck or a Steam Machine, drop in an audio CD, and… nothing happens. The drive spins up, the disc is clearly there, but Dolphin refuses to show you anything useful. Data discs mount just fine; audio CDs don't, because an audio CD has no filesystem to mount in the first place. Something has to read the raw tracks and present them as files, and on KDE that something is audiocd-kio, which SteamOS doesn't ship by default.

Here's how to add it.

Unlock the filesystem

SteamOS keeps its root filesystem read-only so that system updates can replace it wholesale. To install anything with pacman, you have to turn that off first.

sudo steamos-readonly disable

You'll need a sudo password

If you've never set one, open Konsole in Desktop Mode and run passwd first. The Deck ships without a password on the deck user, and sudo won't accept an empty one.

Set up the package keyring

SteamOS ships without an initialised pacman keyring, so package signatures can't be verified until you build one. You need both the Arch keys and Valve's own holo keys.

sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman-key --populate holo

Install the KIO worker

sudo pacman -S audiocd-kio

This gives KDE the audiocd:/ protocol, which exposes the tracks on a CD as if they were files in a folder.

Lock it back down

Don't skip this. Leaving the root filesystem writable invites SteamOS updates to fail in interesting ways.

sudo steamos-readonly enable

Using it

Switch to Desktop Mode, insert a disc, and open Dolphin. Typing audiocd:/ into the location bar gets you a set of folders — one per format — containing the album's tracks. Copying a file out of one of those folders rips and encodes it on the fly, so dragging the FLAC folder onto your home directory is all a "rip this CD" workflow really needs.

Playback works the same way: point your media player of choice at the tracks under audiocd:/ and it'll read straight off the disc.

This won't survive a system update

SteamOS updates replace the entire root partition, which means anything installed with pacman disappears. Keep these commands somewhere handy — you'll be running them again after the next update.

If you want something more permanent, Distrobox or a Flatpak ripper such as fre:ac live in your home directory and stay put across updates. But for simply reading a CD in the file manager you already have, four commands is hard to beat.