From owner-freebsd-hardware Fri Dec 11 09:56:06 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id JAA04869 for freebsd-hardware-outgoing; Fri, 11 Dec 1998 09:56:06 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from pegasus.com ([209.84.70.244]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id JAA04858 for ; Fri, 11 Dec 1998 09:56:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from richard@pegasus.com) Received: by pegasus.com (8.6.8/PEGASUS-2.2) id HAA09539; Fri, 11 Dec 1998 07:55:26 -1000 Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 07:55:26 -1000 From: richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) Message-Id: <199812111755.HAA09539@pegasus.com> In-Reply-To: PB "Re: sane sound cards?" (Dec 11, 2:23pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92) To: PB Subject: Re: sane sound cards? Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org } >All of the cards I've checked into appear to fail because there is no data } >buffer on the card. At least not large enough to handle 44.1kHz stereo. } >My guess is that somewhere between 16K and 64K bytes of buffer should be } >sufficient. } } Buffering is done with primary memory. Card only needs about 4K buffer. } What do you mean by primary memory? If it ain't on the card it's not what I want. If it's not on the sound card a slow device elsewhere on the system will be able to starve the sound card. } >I've recently been using a SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold, with a 200Mhz } >MMX Pentium running 3.0-RELEASE. It works fine while lightly loaded. } >But will start dropping audio data as the load climbs a bit. A second } >or two of on-board buffering should fix the problem completely, and make } >it possible to play mp3s on slower systems. (Dedicating a whole machine } >to this function for want of a few K-bytes of buffer seems pretty silly.) } > } } I think your problem is IDE, I have seen this problem several times. As soon } an IDE unit is used in the system. mp3 playing becomes a lot easier } disturbed task. } } Advise .. use SCSI ONLY. Ofcourse it's a question of money too.. ;) } } If you really must use IDE, throw them to another computer which runs as a } NFS server. Who said anything about IDE? Yikes! I don't have any of that junk on any of my systems. My problem is insufficient buffering on the sound card. Poor card design. I'm almost certain that this is a problem endemic to most all current systems. Given a bit of load just about any configuration will fail to deliver uninterrupted audio. (At least for 200Mhz CPUs and below.) A larger on-card buffer would make the problem go away. So are there any good sound cards out there? Thanks Richard To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message