Sound card pain and suffering...

ME dugan at passwall.com
Fri Feb 16 22:47:34 PST 2001


Worked with a card that was MB integrated, and a PCI AWE 128, and AWE 64
from creative labs. Made all of them work to differing extents.

ISA SB 16 was easy and just worked (Seem to have the best support for many
of the CL SB ISA boards.)

AWE 64 and AWE 128 PCI needed some tuning with registering resources with
the whole lspci and registration of the devices' resources. MIDI did not
work "as-is" with the syth on board  for the 64 and 128 SB, so I used
playmidi to translate midi stuff into sounds played through the dsp or
audio device. (Helped someone at an Install Fest with this too.)

Last, for an integrated SB card (from a Dell) that seemed to be recognized
with the ES1371 module/driver even more problems were found:

 1- I still have not set up the on-baord synth to work - not much time,
might eventually work some day...
 2- 8 KHz audio seemed to play ok, but other sampling frequencies did not
work so well with ESD.(Might be a configuration issue, or driver problem,
I have not had time to investigate.)
 3- every time the sound hardware was initialized, the settings for
volumes control were re-inited to be zero, and the sound levels had toi be
increased close to 80 or 90% of bar values to hear music.

I do not recall having to use the pci reservation utilities for the ES1371
driver based sound hardware, but maybe I will check it out again later.

I would try starting up some volume/bass/treble controls as well as master
volume, and put them close to 90%, and then try playing 8kHz sampled files
through /dev/audio, and/or 8kHz wav-audio files through /dev/dsp. If this
"works" then you might at least have something with the present RH setup
on your machine. (I would try to cat them direct to the auudio device, and
for now just keep ESD disabled if you use that.)

I know someone else that has a bit of hardware that uses the ES1371, and
he may remember his setup better than I remember mine. He does subscribe
to this list. Let's see if he also responds too.

Lastly, I should mention that I use Debian, but the problem here is not
distro speciific - it is specific to the hardware, and the drivers within
the linux kernel. (If it can be made to work with Debian on kernel X.Y.Z,
the same exact hardware should be able to work with RH with kernel X.Y.Z.

IF I get time, maybe I'll try 2.4.1 out on it to see if it works any
better...

-ME

On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Cameron Tully-Smith wrote:
> Hi...
> 
> I'm trying to get a SoundBlaster/Ensoniq (Creative Labs) AudioPCI card 
> (recognized as an ES1371, though it says "1274:5880 (rev 02)" when I run 
> lspci -n) working on my Red Hat 6.2 system.  So far, sndconfig recognizes 
> the card (it says "Model: Ensoniq|CT5880") but I don't hear the sound 
> sample that it tries to play.  I'm using whatever RH 6.2 includes by 
> default.  Originally, motherboard sound (AC97 compatible) was enabled by 
> accident, though I believe it's disabled now since, after I set up the CMOS 
> setup to get rid of the motherboard sound, kudzu came up and asked if I 
> wanted to remove the drivers and I said yes.
> 
> Has anyone else had any experience (good or bad) with this card?  Has 
> anyone tried the ALSA drivers (especially with this card)?  I'd be happy to 
> try the ALSA drivers if I know someone else has gotten them to 
> work...  otherwise, I'd rather not spend the time to do all the stuff in 
> the mini-howto for it.  In terms of sound capabilities, I'd like to use the 
> soundcard for games and maybe the occasional CD playing...  I don't have 
> MIDI devices to control directly and don't care about playing MIDI files in 
> general.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.
> 
> Cameron
> lpstudy at sonic.net
> 
> 





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