Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 06:05:52 -0700 From: Ross Lippert <ripper@eskimo.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: why does motherboard sound suck? Message-ID: <20031009060552.A27500@eskimo.eskimo.com>
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I just got new hardware and I installed 5.1 on it (not tht it matters, because what I am asking about is observed in 4.X). Why is it that so-called the built-in soundcard that my motherboard comes with does work with everything? By that I mean that I can play the usual multimedia stuff without a hitch, xmms, mpg123, mplayer, artsd all work just fine. The card comes up as some AC97 under pcm. But if I try to use some of the more esoteric ports like stella or festival, I get no sound. With festival I can do a trick like filter the output through the command 'sox -r 1600 -t sw $FILE -r 4800 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp' because it provides hooks to do this, but I don't see why I have to (btw the port can't build festival on 5.1 yet, but you can on 4.X, and I am working on patching it for 5.1). stella, the atari emulator, has the same trouble. I have observed this on another motherboard with a so-called built-in soundcard as well (mpg123 plays, sox plays, stella doesn't) about 2 years ago (problem solved by buying a SB16 for it). The solution has, in the past, been to just keep using an old soundblaster card and disabling motherboard sound in favor of the SB card. But I am tired of using up a PCI slot just to keep a handful of my favorite ports running. I've looked at the sources to festival (and a bit at stella, though I do not understand them as well), specicially the voxware.cc file which seems to talk directly to /dev/dsp. It doesn't seem to do anything fancy, just sets the same rate and copies an array of sound bytes to a FILE*. So I ask, where does the fault lie? Is stella/festival soundblaster centric, and just won't talk to AC97 cards? Is my motherboard AC97 deficient? And why are motherboard cards deficient? Should I focus my energy on my hardware (replace card)? My OS (debug AC97 driver or find a sox-like workaround for stella)? Or my apps (debug stella and festival)? I'll bet there are other ports that I don't use that have this same trouble. -r
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