When trying to rip an Audio CD using K3b I get the following message: Please insert an Audio CD medium. The OK option is greyed out and the only option is to cancel the request.

I believe this is a KDE issue (although this may be because I did not install the prerequisites for multimedia correctly) because while I can access the CD using dolphin's audiocd:/ I can only copy the full track; the mp3/flac/etc directories are all empty which to me indicates another issue; however, despite this I have no issues playing or ripping audio cds in applications unrelated to KDE.

I can play cds with mplayer and rip CDs via ripperX (using cdparanoia) and via line command (cdda2wav) and convert them with lame. I'm guessing this means that I have all of the necessary audio applications installed, so is there anything else I need to install to get K3b to allow me to do the same tasks? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Distro: Gentoo
ROM Hardware: Samsung CDDVDW SH-222AB
Kernel version: 3.6.11
KDE version: 4.9.5
K3b version: 2.0.2-r4

If you need any more info, please let me know. Thanks in advance for your time and assistance.

this is a guess:

K3b -> settings -> configure k3b -> programs -> programs -> cdread, what programs are listed? is one of them checked? does the one checked actually exist?

also look at the plugins -> auto decoder -> k3bwave decoder it should be checked

ps - I use Audex it has much more functionality for cd ripping (covers, artistname, ....)

With regards to the audiocd:/ issue, I suggest checking the settings in System Settings > Multimedia > Audio CDs.
Ogg Vorbis based ripping should always be available in theory.

If you self compiled KDE, then I would also suggest checking the build output of "kdemultimedia" to ensure all necessary dependencies were available when the module was built.

Installing Audex did the trick. Thank you both very much for your time and suggestions.

Update: uninstalled Audex and K3B is still working fine. I'm assuming that the necessary dependency that I was missing was installed with Audex. Again thanks.