From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Nov 3 20:35: 5 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ABB5D37B401 for ; Sun, 3 Nov 2002 20:35:03 -0800 (PST) Received: from blueyonder.co.uk (pcow058o.blueyonder.co.uk [195.188.53.98]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3188843E3B for ; Sun, 3 Nov 2002 20:34:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from andrew@cream.org) Received: from pcow058m.blueyonder.co.uk ([127.0.0.1]) by blueyonder.co.uk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.757.75); Mon, 4 Nov 2002 04:34:51 +0000 Received: from cream.org (unverified [62.31.103.12]) by pcow058m.blueyonder.co.uk (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.9) with ESMTP id ; Mon, 4 Nov 2002 04:34:50 +0000 Message-ID: <3DC5F8FE.5070106@cream.org> Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 04:35:10 +0000 From: Andrew Boothman User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Novice question about testing sound cards References: <97247.1036359573@monkeys.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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