Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.

A cable used to send audio CD sound to the computer's sound card. When playing audio CDs, CD-ROM drives output analog sound to both a headphone jack and external connector just like a CD player.

A mildly annoying trend over recent years has been for USB hardware devices to expose a CD-ROM drive containing their drivers for Windows users. Of course there’s no real CD in there ...