Ejecting CDs are Frustrating

[Lukas Sabota]

Hey,
Ejecting CDs, especially Audio CDs, in Ubuntu can be quite frustrating.  
Often times when I would like to eject a CD from my desktop, I get a 
descriptive error that says: "Unable to eject media" and "Show more 
details".  Alright, I would like to find out more details of the 
problem.  My details are "eject: unable to eject, last error: Invalid 
Argument".  Hmm, not quite the details I was looking for.  That doesn't 
help me solve my problem at all.
So my next step is to umount the drive through the command line.
lukas at gnarley:/$  cd /media/
lukas at gnarley:/media$  umount cdrom0/
umount: /media/cdrom0 is not mounted (according to mtab)
What? My CD is mounted! I see it on the desktop
lukas at gnarley:/media$  cd cdrom0
lukas at gnarley:/media/cdrom0$ ls
Nothing?  Odd, where are my audio tracks?

Alright, why don't I try to eject from the command line?

lukas at gnarley:~$ eject
eject: unable to eject, last error: Invalid argument

Hmm, that desciptive error message is showing up again.  Odd.

So it looks like we have two problems here:
The first and less severe is that audio tracks are not mounted to the 
file system, there are just visible in nautilous.  Quite odd.  I believe 
there is a kernel patch or something that allows the mounting of audio 
CDs, am I right?
The second is that the CD will not eject unless you use a pin or restart 
the machine. Even if there is some error with the CD media, there is no 
reason for my computer to keep the CD in the trey.  That is quite 
obtrusive.  And even if Ubuntu has a good reason for keeping my CD in 
the drive, I have no idea what that is.  "eject: unable to eject, last 
error: Invalid argument" gives me no insight whatsoever.

I do believe this is a software problem and not a hardware problem, as 
this has happened through many CD drives.

Luke