I had some big successes last night with two of my audio cards that have had troubleshooting threads on this list in the last couple of months. I browsed over the archives and didn't find any comprehensive solutions, so here it goes.
The first card is the Emagic EMI 2|6 USB audio device and the second is a via82xx card built into the mainboard. Both cards are recording and playing back audio at CD quality in many programs without dropouts. The third card is an M-Audio Delta 1010-LT but I never had any problems with that card beyond the initial installation. One system is a dirt cheap VIA motherboard (~ US $50) with an AMD Athlon XP 2200. The mobo has a bunch of PCI devices built-in: a video card, a NIC, 6 USB ports and the audio card. The other system is a Compaq mobo with a 1Ghz Athlon with only USB and Firewire built in PCI devices. I found the Compaq in a trash pile (I love New York City) and discovered it was thrown out because the hard drive was broken, so it's not exactly a "stable system" but it works. I'm running Gentoo Linux on both. The stock gentoo-sources kernel and the stable alsa-driver-0.9.2 ebuilds were a little out of date and both cards didn't work well at all. I emerged the ck-sources kernel, which is 2.4.22 and emerged the unstable alsa-driver-0.9.7-r3 which is available in portage but must be explicitly pointed to with "emerge -u media-sound/alsa-driver/alsa-driver-0.9.7-r3.ebuild" (I think that's right, you might have to locate the exact spelling of the ebuild). The one strange dependency for the 0.9.7 alsa-driver was the development-sources-2.6.0-test6 kernel, which I ignored and compiled against 2.4.22 without problems. The EMI 2|6 needs a kernel version higher than 2.4.20 to properly load the firmware. The via82xx module needs dxs_support=3 and ac97_clock=44100 as options in /etc/modules.d/alsa to playback without loud annoying clicks and a higher pitch (since the card's default rate is 48000). dxs_support is not available as an option in alsa-driver-0.9.2 so you must update to get the card to work properly. If setting this options to 3 doesn't work, try 1 or 2, 'update-modules && /etc/init.d/alsasound restart" I tried but couldn't get the EMI 2|6 firmware to load at boot time on the Compaq system, so I had to boot then "modprobe emi26" then manually start alsa from "/etc/init.d/alsasound start". One hang up with getting the EMI firmware working with ALSA is that the USB Audio modules (audio.o) CANNOT be loaded, only the firmware. This was confusing to me because the kernel config puts the emi26 module as a submenu of audio.o After the low level stuff was working, I did encounter varying performance with different applications. XMMS plays back fine with either the ALSA driver or the OSS driver on the via82xx. ogg123 plays back fine on the via82xx but has dropouts in ALSA mode on the EMI 2|6. Curiously, it does not have dropouts playing the same file in OSS mode. aplay plays back CD quality wav files fine on both cards. The Audacity 1.2 CVS on the via82xx records without dropouts but plays back with dropouts using OSS emulation via the Portaudio API. Finally, the M-Audio Delta 1010-LT works great and all the controls are available via the envy24control mixer program, part of alsa-tools (or alsa-utils, I forget which). The last step is to get the EMI running on Gentoo PPC on my Powerbook G3. Which I'll try by this weekend. It feels so good to have everything working properly now, back up to the point my Mac was before I ditched it for the future. Thanks to all the ALSA developers for their dedication to the community. -- -l[e^2] ------------------------------ http://www.fallingforward.net/ people experimenting with music, art and technology ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by OSDN developer relations Here's your chance to show off your extensive product knowledge We want to know what you know. Tell us and you have a chance to win $100 http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?HRPT1X3RYQNC5V4MLNSV3E54 _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
