On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 07:16:23AM -0500, Nyal wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> I'm new to Linux, currently using Mandrake 9.2 and I have a question about a
> soundblaster card that's in this box I just bought.....
>
> I'm trying to get it to work but so far no luck....Mandrake recognizes the
> card and has snd-emu10k1 (EMU10K1) as the driver........
You've got a Live or Audigy card. What's more , it looks like you have
ALSA drivers for it. Before I get into many details about Linux, there
are some interesting things you need to know about the emu10k[12] and AC97
combination. The description below is based on a Live card, but it
applies to Audigy's as well so far as I know:
Windows tries hard to hide this from you, but you basically have two sound
cards. One of them is analog, the other is digital. All of your analog
connections on the card go through your AC97 chip. Your analog speakers
also run through the AC97. The AC97 has an aux output that goes to the
EMU10k1 (or 10k2 for Audigy) chip. This card controls digital speakers
and has the effects processor and whatnot. It handles wavetable (only
matters with ALSA, OSS drivers don't support this function) if you're
using the card as a MIDI synth, PCM sound (playing wav or mp3 files), etc.
It also controls the {Live,Audigy}Drive, if you have one of those.
The reason why this matters is that, the emu10k1 also routes back into the
AC97 chip via its PCM input. This means it's possible to create feedback
loops and the like when fiddling with the various mixer settings, etc.
Also, what you hear out of analog speakers may not match what you hear out
of digital ones. Doing it this way means it's a little less flexible than
it could/should be, but it allowed Creative to use an off-the-shelf AC97
chip and save some green.
To configure this beast, you want alsamixer. And you want to hit the
emu10k1 ALSA wiki page, though you'll have to google for that since I do
not remember where it is now. alsamixer has LOTS of settings, and most of
them you will be able to change there, but should not. Their values make
no sense anyway, they're actually switches and things you'd set with
another program. The wiki page will have details.
> I've played with AuMix and KMix but no luck.....looked at the Soundblaster
> website but no luck (or drivers) there.
You won't find it there. You want to go to either emu10k1.sf.net (OSS) or
somewhere off of alsa-project.org (ALSA, what you're using..)
> The motherboard I've got (ASUS K7M) has Onboard AC'97 audio that I can use if
> the SB card is a no-go.
>
> Am I missing something or is Creative just Linux Unfriendly? I'd like to get
> sound up and running so's I could listen to CDs (or 'net Radio) while I
> browse the www.
You're missing a lot of somethings, mostly in that the driver is far more
complex than you bargained for because, although ALSA tries to simplify
the setup a little bit, its mixer ends up complicating things. The OSS
drivers can do more (eg, use the effects processor), but you have to
control all of the emu10k1 functions with seperate programs that use
neither OSS nor ALSA control mechanisms. In OSS at least, the OSS mixer
controls are tied to the card's AC97 controls, so unless you have digital
speakers or so you're probably good to go.
The OSS drivers can do one thing for people with digital speakers - turn
off the AC97's PCM and set the AC97 capture to igain (that is, all analog
devices) which is good if you want line-in and cdrom and everything else
to just work without thinking about it for digital speakers as they do for
analog..
The ALSA drivers have only one interface for configuring them, the mixer
(and sfxload if you use the wavetable feature, but that's a different
story all together..) This winds up simpler in the long run because you
can set it once and forget it unless you need to change capture devices
and set up ALSA to automatically save and restore your mixer settings on
reboot. (It should already be so configured for you..) Learning what all
those damned controls are for and how to set the ones that aren't sliders
if you need to (you shouldn't need to) is a bit of work.
Windows is so much simpler. But, the Linux drivers are both so much more
powerful. ;)
> Any help is mucho appreciated and look for other newbie questions from me in
> the future!
Hope that helps at least a little bit.
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