why does motherboard sound suck?

From: Ross Lippert (ripper_at_eskimo.com)
Date: 10/09/03

  • Next message: Lowell Gilbert: "Re: Logging users activity with termlog" 
    Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 06:05:52 -0700
To: questions@freebsd.org

    I just got new hardware and I installed 5.1 on it (not tht it matters,
    because what I am asking about is observed in 4.X).

    Why is it that so-called the built-in soundcard that my motherboard
    comes with does work with everything?

    By that I mean that I can play the usual multimedia stuff without
    a hitch, xmms, mpg123, mplayer, artsd all work just fine. The card comes
    up as some AC97 under pcm.

    But if I try to use some of the more esoteric ports like stella
    or festival, I get no sound. With festival I can do a trick like
    filter the output through the command
     'sox -r 1600 -t sw $FILE -r 4800 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp'
    because it provides hooks to do this, but I don't see why I have to
    (btw the port can't build festival on 5.1 yet, but you can on 4.X,
    and I am working on patching it for 5.1).

    stella, the atari emulator, has the same trouble.

    I have observed this on another motherboard with a so-called built-in
    soundcard as well (mpg123 plays, sox plays, stella doesn't) about
    2 years ago (problem solved by buying a SB16 for it).

    The solution has, in the past, been to just keep using an old
    soundblaster card and disabling motherboard sound in favor of the
    SB card. But I am tired of using up a PCI slot just to keep a
    handful of my favorite ports running.

    I've looked at the sources to festival (and a bit at stella, though
    I do not understand them as well), specicially the voxware.cc file
    which seems to talk directly to /dev/dsp. It doesn't seem to do
    anything fancy, just sets the same rate and copies an array of
    sound bytes to a FILE*.

    So I ask, where does the fault lie? Is stella/festival soundblaster centric,
    and just won't talk to AC97 cards? Is my motherboard AC97 deficient?
    And why are motherboard cards deficient? Should I focus my energy
    on my hardware (replace card)? My OS (debug AC97 driver or find a sox-like
    workaround for stella)? Or my apps (debug stella and festival)?

    I'll bet there are other ports that I don't use that have this same
    trouble.

    -r
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  • Next message: Lowell Gilbert: "Re: Logging users activity with termlog"

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