Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 10:53:44 -0500 From: "M. Poulin" <mpoulin@honk.org> To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Anyone else getting grief from "Soundblaster compatible" sound cards? Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19990126105344.008fcc80@spectre.honk.org>
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<rant> I've been working on this for a few weeks - the guys in -questions have done their best so far to give me some useful pointers, but ultimately I think I am going to blame the cheap onboard components I got with my computer. In a nutshell, I have a Pentium MMX 233 system that came with an onboard 4MB video card and an onboard 16-bit "soundblaster compatible" sound card. The video card impressed me so much it took me about 30 seconds to decide to plug in my old trusty PCI Mach 64. (the best resolution the onboard card could push out was 800 x 600 @ 16bit color, with a brain numbing 65Hz refresh rate. Makes you wonder what the 4MB video ram was used for...) Anyway, the sound card seemed to be ok, at least in Win98. I checked all of the settings, and they look to be the same as a soundblaster (same IO, IRQ, DMA, etc.), so I set about configuring my FreeBSD kernel to use a Soundblaster. It works... sort of. I get great sound effects, but no music when I play xdoom. I am able to redirect .au files to /dev/snd0 and they play well enough. Even KDE's kaudioserver seems to work - I am able to get sounds (.wav files) to play. But nothing I have tried will get my audio CD's to play through the sound card. This drives me nuts - the only way I can listen to my CD's in FreeBSD is to plug in some crummy old headphones into the CD-Rom drive. The only other option I have is to boot down to Win98 and use it as a cd player. Which sucks because the less time is spend with Microsoft, the happier I am. Not to mention the fact that I can't play mp3's. I've been trying x11amp, but I think that might be a mistake - from what I've seen x11amp requires OSS, which I don't have installed, nor do I intend to install it. I will try another mp3 player tonight, but I'm not holding my breath. Of course, even in Windoze, mp3's sound like I'm listening to the music under water. Anyway, you gets what you pays for. I got my whole system (minus the monitor) for $699 brand-new. Can't expect much from it I suppose. I'm just wondering if anyone else has suffered the same nonsense that I am going through. I'll probably pick up a real SoundBlaster this weekend - at least I can disable the on-board sound through my BIOS - a luxury I didn't have with the crappy video card. </rant> M. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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