CD players not working

[MR ZenWiz]

I'm running Xubuntu 14.04.1 with all the latest updates, and for some
reason neither of my two disc burners seems to be able to play a song,
or maybe I should say the software won't play the discs.

Mplayer stops and starts every second or so with pauses between each
second played.

Parole can't read the tracks: "GStreamer backend error - Could not
handle CDDA URI"

Because of those, I installed mplayer-gui, which wont' run because it
says "Error in skin config file on line 6: PNG read error in
/usr/shar/mplayer/skins/default/main."

My drive 0 is a blue-ray burner on which I just burned an audio CD
that I'm trying to play.

My drive 1 is a DVD burner that gets the same error in parole and
mplayer gets EOF before anything.

Is there a better choice of media player, or are my drives bad
(neither one is that old), or ???

Thanks.
MR