Today, Benjamin Scott gleaned this insight:
> On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> > I have an SBLive! card which I believe is the same chipset as the SB
> > PCI 128 card.
>
> Nope. Not even close. The SB Live! uses the EMU10K chipset, which Creative
> Labs obtained when the purchased E-mu Systems. The Sound Blaster PCI 128 is
> effectively an Ensoniq AudioPCI, which uses the ES1371 chip. Creative bought
> Ensoniq and relabeled the AudioPCI. In fact, in a PCI device list, the card
> still identifies itself as an AudioPCI. :-)
Ah, bummer. :(
> If you've got an idle minute sometime, take a look at:
Idle minute? What's that?
>
> > I think you'll find that the sequencer works perfectly well under the ALSA
> > drivers.
>
> A year ago when I checked, it did not. Let's see... doesn't look good.
> According to the documentation on the ALSA site, ALSA MIDI is in a pretty
> sorry state. In fact, it claims only one card's MIDI synth works at all --
> the SB AWE. Not the Live, interestingly enough. All the documentation I
> could find is pretty out-of-date... perhaps the software itself is further
> along?
Now that you mention it, I believe that it works using the oss
compatibility modules (included with the source)... and it works just like
an AWE32. (Maybe I said this before, I can't remember now -- I'm too
tired.) If you were to use playmidi, you pass it the same options that
you would pass an AWE32 (-a option).
You also need to use the AWE32 soundfont utility to load a sound font file
prior to actually trying to play midi through it (IIRC the program is
called sfxload).
> Do you know if ALSA has a built-in, software-based MIDI synth yet? I know
> there was talk of one. Right now, Timidity works pretty well for me, but
> anything that tries to use /dev/sequencer directly doesn't work, which is
> annoying.
I am not really sure here... I seem to have some memory of downloading
such a beast, but I can't really be certain I'm just imagining it, and
it's been a while since I last looked, on account of having gotten
playmidi to work with my SBLive! (so, should I end this sentence with
punctuation or not?) I can tell you that if I did download it, I did not
get it to work, because if I did I'd be using it instead of playmidi.
> > The on-line documentation has improved drastically over when I first tried
> > setting them up ...
>
> Hmmm. Most of the documentation I find seems to be current only to 1999.
> Is there some more recent documentation somewhere?
Probably not, but I think maybe someone forgot to update the part that
says when it was last updated... As far as I can tell, the docs for
setting up the SBLive must have been updated some time last year, because
I first tried to get it set up around March or so (I think) when I first
got the card. What they had up on the site at that time didn't really get
me to a point where ANYTHING worked, though I managed to get the card
working by rather a lot of fuss. The second time I tried it the web page
had almost the exact steps I needed to get it working, MIDI and all
(except I don't think they mentioned loading the sound font file... I got
that after the fact from one of the developers).
On the other hand, my memory has been known to be very flawed in the past,
and I can't say with certainty that the above account is truly accurate,
but only that this is how I remember it. At the moment I'm feeling very
groggy and I'd almost be surprised if I could correctly recall my name.
Time for a nap, me thinks... :)
--
You know that everytime I try to go where I really want to be,
It's already where I am, cuz I'm already there...
------------------
Derek D. Martin
Unix/Linux Geek
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
