Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 04:35:10 +0000 From: Andrew Boothman <andrew@cream.org> To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Novice question about testing sound cards Message-ID: <3DC5F8FE.5070106@cream.org> References: <97247.1036359573@monkeys.com>
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Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > The card is now clearly recognized on boot up, however I'm still not > 100% that it's working. I tried using a couple of CD player utilities > and no sound came out if the speakers. The card will only act as a CD-player if it is directly connected to the CD-player by a seperate cable, you mention below that you haven't got one. (I'm sure your local computer shop could supply you with one for almost nothing). > Ok, so question: What's the simplest and easiest way to simply check > to see if a given sound card is working or not? > > I gather that it is _not_ as simple as just cat'ing some .mp3 file to > one of the /dev/dsp* device files, correct? Nope. The DSP devices don't understand mp3, you need an mp3 decoder to do that but there are command-line (non-X) tools that play mp3s - check out audio/mpg123 (or something like that). Also, try doing 'cat /dev/sndstat' to make sure that pcm really does understand your card. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think that you can dump audio file in the 'au' format directly to devices. A test au format file can be found on http://www.cti.ecp.fr/documents/a_sound.au (This was linked to from http://www.cti.ecp.fr/documents/tests/au.html which you might also find useful). You also might want to check that your speakers actually work by connecting them up to your hi-fi or something. I've lost count of the number of times I've spent hours trying to find a fault in completely the *wrong* piece of hardware. :-) Best of luck. Andrew. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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