Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.
I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?
4-conductor audio, generally.
Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.
I vaguely remember CD drives with a headphone jack output!
(E.g. this one: https://pavel.network/using-cd-drive-as-poor-man-audio-playe...)