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Being a Gentoo user, I've been running ALSA for some time. While ALSA has an OSS compat API that you can load, it doesn't allow you to have the full control of more advance cards. (Like the EMU10k1/2 chipsets)

While oss-compat-api will give you basic sound, mixer controls, etc. sometimes you want to do more advanced things. For example, I use a tvtuner app and wanted to be able to control detailed mixer channels (Analog Capture Volume and Analog Playback Volume) that just couldn't be done with OSS. Looking at my app, tvtime, I found it only had OSS mixer controls. So I just took a weekend to learned/wrote the ALSA API version for it. Wasn't too bad and the app works great now. I can configure any control (mixer channel) on any card I want. Hopefully the dev will include the patch I sent it in the 1.0 release this month.

I know that this isn't an option for everyone. But I think as time goes on, more and more apps should have support for ALSA. Especially since it's in the 1.0.x range and the API has become more stable.

Being a Gentoo user, I've been running ALSA for some time. While ALSA has an OSS compat API that you can load, it doesn't allow you to have the full control of more advance cards. (Like the EMU10k1/2 chipsets)

While oss-compat-api will give you basic sound, mixer controls, etc. sometimes you want to do more advanced things. For example, I use a tvtuner app and wanted to be able to control detailed mixer channels (Analog Capture Volume and Analog Playback Volume) that just couldn't be done with OSS. Looking at my app, tvtime, I found it only had OSS mixer controls. So I just took a weekend to learned/wrote the ALSA API version for it. Wasn't too bad and the app works great now. I can configure any control (mixer channel) on any card I want. Hopefully the dev will include the patch I sent it in the 1.0 release this month.

I know that this isn't an option for everyone. But I think as time goes on, more and more apps should have support for ALSA. Especially since it's in the 1.0.x range and the API has become more stable.

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Project

Well unless you left something off or I missed something your chipset is listed as supported. I used a Vortex based card myself for years (Monster) under Linux (I use SB now for the easy support).

Here's a link to the original project (it was merged into the ALSA project):

savannah.nongnu.org/projects/openvortex/

Its also listed in the ALSA matrix as supported:

www.alsa-project.org

My advice would be (and you'll probably hate this) to NOT use Gentoo unless your idea of a relaxing afternoon is digging into the heart of how things work. I've been using Linux for at least 5 years now and I prefer Mandrake because (aside from MandrakeSoft making all their additions GPL) it has great auto configuration and hardware detection.

Before you go crazy at me, you can always try one of their live disks (MandrakeMove) out first and see if it works okay for you.

MandrakeMove

Sometimes easier isn't lame, its productive.

I've had a few friends adventurous to consider playing around with Linux audio programs, but when they ask if their $200 (and up) interfaces don't work and the best I can do is point them to the O'Reilly book on writing Linux drivers, it's (understandably) a real turn-off.

Of course, you're being an ass to them by playing the elitest RTFM! game.

Linux supports a WIDE range of professional sound recording cards. if you would have actually searched instead of acting like a snide know-it-all to your friends you would have known this....

Here, I'll help you...

Alsa sound card matrix.

it shows support for the Sonorus medi/o and studi/o professional 24 channel recording cards.

Oh look it supports the RME hammerfall card 52 recording channels at 24bit resolution.

There are lots more supported, I leave it up to you to find the rest in the link above.

I strongly suggest you actually learn about the ALSA support of professional soundcards and the PRO MIDI interfaces.... the midiman usb midi devices are also well supported and used extensively by professionals. Handing out advice to people when you do not know the facts only spreads bad information.

and as always, find out what is supported and then go buy it. buying something at random and then hoping it is supported is always a silly thing to do.

but there is one hugely crucial element to "the linux studio" that's missing, and that's support for professional sound cards

Well, they're both audio and MIDI sequencers for Linux. They both support outboard MIDI gear, native Linux ALSA soft synths, and audio and transport synchronisation through JACK. Both look and feel somewhat like the big sequencers for other platforms. Both use Qt for their GUIs, though Rosegarden also uses the KDE libraries. I happen to think Rosegarden has the more polished GUI, but I'm biased (see disclaimer at bottom).

Both support arbitrary numbers of MIDI and audio tracks, with audio mixing and routing capabilities. Both support LADSPA effects plugins, of which there are hundreds available free. Both can (with some work!) be made to use VST effects through vstserver. MusE can host VST instruments with libfst using Wine; either of them can drive VST instruments hosted separately using jack_fst. None of these VST solutions is currently at all easy to configure and build, but see here for more information. Rosegarden is implementing the DSSI synth API and will probably ultimately use a DSSI wrapper for VST instruments. Rosegarden can also be run without audio support if you only want MIDI or score, whereas MusE always requires JACK.

My rather fuzzy impression of the difference in "feel" between them is that MusE feels like it came more from a studio/MIDI gearhead background, Rosegarden more from a composition background. MusE is a bit further ahead with things like instrument plugins, audio routing (send/returns etc) and automation. Rosegarden places a lot more emphasis on the score editor, whereas the one that used to be in MusE was actually removed completely for the 0.7 release.

Rosegarden is a somewhat bigger and more complicated program than MusE (c 200K lines of code vs 130K LOC), which you may see as good or bad depending on whether the extra code happens to do stuff you want or not. They're both written in C++, should you happen to care.

On the subject of soundcard support: the usual quick answer is "it's probably supported unless it's FireWire or made by MOTU". In particular the current M-Audio, Terratec and RME semi-pro gear mostly works fine, as well as most consumer cards. The lack of FireWire audio device support currently is a pain though. Anyway, see the ALSA soundcard matrix for detailed information.

(Disclaimer: I am a Rosegarden developer and, although I track MusE CVS, I have never actually managed to get MusE 0.7 to build because I don't have the right libraries and autotools. So do take all this with a pinch of salt.)

ALSA isn't a daemon- it's a hardware interface. Sound daemons (like ARTS) provide functioanlity above what ALSA offers- like software-level mixing and effects. It's the only one I'm running right now, no bloat here.

ALSA does, FYI, have software mixing...

take a look at dmix. ...then sit back and smile.

Of course, modern sound cards really ought to have hardware mixing.

My SuSE box plays concurrent sounds just fine using Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. I can have XMMS and AlsaPlayer both running and playing their music mixed no problem. I have a Compaq Presario 1700XL laptop and SuSE 9 had all the drivers for my complete hardware configuration (video, sound, touchpad, etc.), the only thing I had to specify was which ethernet driver to use for the network install (tulip). To get to the point, it seems that Linux has become better since the last time you checked it out...

1. You compiled the kernel with ISA support, but isapnp is a user-land utility that tries to autoprobe ISA soundcards. Kernel tends to avoid that.
   
2. Drivers that are compiled in the kernel that do not autoprobe hardware still need parameters. They are passed in boot time on the kernel boot string. If you have them as modules, they are passed via insmod, making tinkering so much more convenient (no reboots).
   
3. If you are using ALSA, then this should be extremely helpful.
   

"...a wake up call to the slashdot croud who perpetually fool themselves as to how good linux is [...] i've been reading slashdot for the last 5 years"

You may have been reading Slashdot but it doesn't sound like you know much about Linux.

Linux has _dramatically_ improved the underlying sound system over the supposed time you've been following Slashdot. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), which is now part of the 2.6 kernel series, resolves many of the criticims directed at OSS that a user _might_ have noticed in the past.

Personally I've tried a number of sound cards over the years; the only issue I've ever run into was the lack of support from the manufacturer.

Making it 'easy for mom and pop' doesn't exist in Windows land either. Mom and Pop get their drivers installed for them when they buy their PC and _never_ know how to do a driver upgrade unless they get their hands held by a technical support person. I'm always seeing people in the service lines of the multitude of computer stores of my city for getting help to update/install new devices in their computer.

"You need freeze the work geared up towards developers."

LOL ... if you want user-friendly 'I don't want to think about my PC' Linux buy a computer from Lindows or pay for support from somebody.

Most of the ones I've tried have worked fine, whether I needed them or not. I have noticed though that OSS drivers were flakey.

PlanetCCRMA simplifies ALSA installation and configuration on Redhat and Fedora. It's worked with all the on-board sound cards I've run across, which surprised me. Works great with most cards.

The only ones that seem to stink are the ones targetted to gamers, with lots of explosions and bikini babes on the box. I've tested these and they tend to suck for various reasons, locked sample rate, very noisy, etc... The less expensive ones are actually better.

See the ALSA sound card matrix before you buy.

=R

I was curious about the sound since I had had a hard time trying to get esd and artsd working at the same time. I only have one dsp on my sound card and wrapping esd or artsd to the other can result in some noticeable problems. If you're just using one of them you wouldn't have that problem though. Recently (April 12th) I found out about dmix in a somewhat random thread on a mailing list I'm on. Should make things a lot easier, but I haven't really given it a strong enough pounding to see how well it works yet. I had thought the alsa people were against doing software mixing at the alsa level because they considered software mixing in the kernel to be "a bad thing", but there it is.

I wasn't suggesting rdesktop for the quickbooks problem. rdesktop is not a solution for any application which requires constant use by multiple people. I just mentioned it because not many people seem to know it exist, and I was wondering if you had some legacy apps employees rarely need to use that you were using it for. rdesktop is perfect for that. We use to do that at one place I worked, well actually we did that because we were to lazy to walk the ten feet or so to the windows machine the app ran on, but you get the idea.

Several possibilities for your sound lagging problem:

1- you might be using a sound daemon with too big a buffer. First see if you are using a sound daemon (arts (KDE) or esd (Gnome)). I don't use Gnome, but to turn off arts in KDE, run the control center, Sound and Multimedia, Sound system, untick the "start aRts soundserver on KDE startup". This should actually stop it.

The odd thing is that you don't need these sound daemons most of the time. At least I live perfectly well without them. They are needed on cheap hardware to mix sounds coming from different applications at once. On good quality sound cards this is done in hardware, no deamon needed.

2- Your sound card is not very well supported in Linux. This is often an issue with sound cards integrated with the motherboard, and particularly the Intel kind. To fix this, you can either buy an el-cheapo PCI soundblaster, or you can use ALSA (advanced Linux sound architecture) instead of OSS (the traditional Linux drivers). The former are included with Linux 2.6.x, the latter are included with 2.4.x and before.

If you are still running 2.4.x (as I am) you can compile ALSA separately for your kernel (or maybe your distribution provides it). There is a world of difference between ALSA and OSS in terms of quality and it is well worth the switch.

With both tips combined you should be able to get rid of your delays. Good luck.

I've seen a lot of Intel8x0 fixes in the changelog...

You don't have to upgrade your kernel to install the latest ALSA drivers. Just download the source from the ALSA site, build and install it. I never use the ALSA drivers in the 2.6.x kernels (they never seem to work correctly for me, if at all). I never have problems with the official source versions though.

BTW, if your card is working ok with OSS emulation, what's the problem?

You know, silly stuff like reliable, robust video and sound drivers.

It's funny, but Linux is in much better shape for video drivers than audio ones. Since the game-capable graphics market only includes two companies, Linux is already adequately usable.

But since soundcards are technically easier to make, there's many more brands still in active use. Many gamers who buy the latest NVidias to squeeze a few more FPS or pixels might still be satisfied using motherboard audio output, or a $2.50 PCI soundcard.

Linux audio support is close to adequate... but unfortunately, the Alsa Project's longstanding philosophical refusal to move software mixing into the central driver means you still can't expect Linux to run games on any random piece of desktop PC hardware.

What you really want then is not Audacity, but Ardour together with Jack and an ALSA-supported soundcard

That's what a hacker do - take some existing tech and use it in new ways. If you can live within the frequency range of sound (up to 96khz, for most cards) a sound card is an excellent tool for signal analysis. Plus: there's already many tools and libraries out there for audio manipulation - Heck! you could probably even write the software for you needs in Python!

those instructions do not apply to my situation.

Hey clueless, your chipset is listed right there on the goddamn alsa page. A trained monkey could install the thing with those instructions. Your only situation is that you need to pull your thumb out of your ass and get a clue.

and please do not call linux users "lazy."

I'm not calling linux users lazy, I'm calling you lazy fucktard.

you're not unemployed by chance are you?

Like it's any of your fucking business.. but yeah, I got a pretty sweet job. I'm a work-from-home IT Manager. I manage a small team of programmers and sysadmins. I work from home every day except Tuesdays. I go into the office once a week for a couple of short meetings. Then it's back home for another work week where I do what I do best: programming, running Linux servers, and calling out lazy idiots like you when I see them. Everyday I get up around 8:55, walk down stairs to my office, login to my workstation and start my day. I can feel your envy from here!

i sincerely hope you are more intelligent than you sound.

There's no need in hoping anything on my behalf, my systems all have sound and work great.

compiling programs require a lot of time on the part of the user.

Oh boo! Poor baby can't stand a little compile time. You might as well just use windows as lazy as you are.

good for you! what does that have to do with my hardware?

It means your incapable of following simple instructions for your particular chipset.

i mean, am i missing something?

Obviously.. If you wanna run bloated binaries on your own hardware that you don't even seem to know very well, that's your own laziness. But you can always count on smart people telling you that's not optimal, and that a better way exists. A little extra time invested in the beginning goes a hell of a long way in performance gains down the road.

i waited for over a year before i went ahead in installing gentoo

The docs are right there.. so aside from someone doing the install for you, I don't see taking a year to prepare for a simple install. I think you needed the year to get up off your lazy ass and do it.

allow linux users to make an informed decision based on all the positives and negatives.

What negatives? I see none. All I see is a lazy wanna-be linux user who thinks average is good enough. Maybe you should try politics Anonymous Coward.

I have some rare BA speakers notorious for Linux incompatibilities. Only Drake9.1/SUSE/Lycoris seem to recognize them).

OSS drivers?

Forgive me if I missunderstand, but I hope you don't mean Open Sound System. Last I heard that project was long ago superseded by ALSA Those guys have really been on the ball. I don't think we need to worry too much about not having opensource drivers.

• 
  bttv/v4l patch
  
  bluez kernel patch (bluetooth)
  
  matrox frame buffer patch
  
  alsa 1.0.1 kernel patch
  
  hostap (accesspoint sw for prism hardware)
  
  qc-usb (quickcam express driver)

are you talking about the stuttering sound alot of people have reported (including myself) with mythtv? if so i dont know that the new kernel fixed it but heres how i did: leave sound enabled in the bios, but uncheck alsa. rebuild. now download the newly released alsa-driver 1.0.1. build and install these

The subject pretty much says it all ...

Read this or this for more info.

Death to ESD/ARTS today!! (and maybe even JACK, if we can low enough latency).

Sunny Dubey

I'm looking forward to the end the nasty OSSFree, and the beginning of the silky smooth default included Alsa sound kernel.

no more annoying upgrading my system to Alsa when I want to make it into a professional audio workstation

As far as I know you won't have to change anything. Just make sure you have the latest version of all the ALSA programs installed and you should be set.

According to the Alsa Soundcard Matrix the extigy "Doesn't really do 24 bits via USB. Doesn't really do 96 kHz via USB." The Audigy2 doesn't seem to be listed. None of the M-Audio (Midiman) USB devices are listed with this "problem".

Though new drivers from begin to support it almost transparently, lack of a standard way (no, esd is not great) to make multiple applications share a sound card (realtime mixing from multiple sources).

Resolution of this great life problem would bring to its knees my second greatest annoyance: when a soundapp crashes and doesn't free its lock on the sound module, you're stuck with no sound until you reboot and/or use black magic to bypass module logic and remove the module by hand, tainting your kernel and feeling bad about it.

Uh, the Santa Cruz Turtle Beach uses a Cirrus Logic SoundFusion DSP, which is supported by the cs46xx module in the 2.4 series and also by ALSA.

The Echo Layla also has ALSA support, although it is still in development.

What you are describing points to Mandrake not being ready for prime time. I too have an Nforce2 board and under gentoo, my onboard nic and sound work just fine. The sound is a version of the Intel ICH audio controller and is supported by the vanilla linux kernel. Mandrake is not detecting it or setting things up properly. Alsa supports the nforce audio more completely than the kernel drivers. My GeForce3 is fully supported too and plays games very well.

I can understand your frustration though, just point it in the proper direction and problems get solved much quicker. Many games now run fine in plain wine or winex. You could either pay for a winex subscription and get binary packages or compile the CVS version.

Also keep in mind the simple truth that you are free to not run linux. It is not as easy to find support for new hardware or run the newest software on and I understand that. I choose to run linux and still choose to run WinXP. I've seen several people put much more effort into whining about how bad linux is than it would take to learn how to properly configure an installation.

It would seem the biggest problem here is lack of driver support for a wide range of pro-audio sound cards and interfaces. Looking at the ALSA supported hardware page (which this workstation utilizes), most of the pro hardware hasn't been verified to work well.

I think the other major downside is the lack of VST plug-in support. Most every major digital audio software workstation like ProTools and Nuendo take advantage of the large array of VST plug-ins available for things like effects processing. I don't think you'll see a lot of pro audio guys contemplate switching over until VST support is added (in Ardour's defense, VST support is tricky because a lot of them are platform-specific due to bad design).

However, I salute them for their work and hope that Ardour matures into a great package.

IMHO, I think that kids who want to program will learn to program.

Mixing is already there in ALSA: dmix

0x0d0a (568518) wrote:
> ALSA's biggest drawback is the project policy that software mixing should be done in userspace (presumably by a separate project).

Since 0.9.1 ALSA can do mixing itself, with the so called dmix-plugin. You can throw away soundservers now, except of course JACK which is a lot more than a simple mixing sound server.
-- fbar

So, anyone know a soundcard that will let me play mutiple streams WITHOUT having to use esd/artsd, and is decently well supported under Linux? Anyone? BTW, can we keep it under $100 (USD) if possible?

Trident 4DWave NX/DX based cards are excellent! Not sure if they're still available though. For about $20 you get a card with S/PDIF out and at least 16 stereo pcm devices with ALSA. I bought a couple of them at Hoontech Taiwan (just checked. no longer available from their site).

But check out the ALSA Soundcard Matrix and look for entries which have Note (4), hardware mixing support.

-adnans

Mackie [mackie.com], Alesis [alesis.com], M-audio [m-audio.com], Roland [roland.com], and MOTU [motu.com] (among others) also make professional audio interface equipment for recording and monitoring/listening.

Cross referencing your list with the ALSA Sound Card matrix, I can only find Roland as having Linux capable cards.

Can you by any chance recommend a card that will work with Linux?

in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many cutting edge Linux audio and MIDI applications.

(The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).

• With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
• To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
• The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.

I mean ALSA is absurd: every time you upgrade your kernel, you recompile. [...] Get stuff working for average users, Linux audio devs.

Average users do apt-get upgrade kernel or something to that effect, at which point ALSA is upgraded automatically. That is, if their distribution is worth its storage space.

The initial bits of configuration are tougher, but the ALSA website provides sample configurations for all supported cards.

Come to think of it, so does ALSA.

mumbles somethign about stupid 20 second limit...

You might want to check out the dmix plugin recently added to ALSA, which provides easy software mixing.

In related news, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture has just released its newest stable version, 0.9.1.

The linux sound community has been waiting for this for a long time. Congrats guys!

Please, people, if you don't know what s/he's asking, keep your trap shut, m'kay? We're talking audio here, so signal-to-noise ratio counts, you see...

But, do you want to go the hardware or software recording route?

If you have a decent enough computer (G3 macs or PII upwards x86s will do the trick for about 16 tracks), you might consider getting a good soundcard.

I personally use a M-Audio Delta44, 4 inputs, 4 outputs, nothing more. Perfect for recording. They have nice break-out boxes, so you don't have to crouch behind your computer when plugging in your guitars, basses or mics, they work under Macs, PC's and have linux support via ALSA (yes, linux can do multitracking as well). When you need more tracks, you can just add more cards and get 8/8 or up to 16/16 in/out-system.

As for recording software, well... my delta came with a cut-down version of Logic Audio, which should be good enough for start. Most 'pro-sumer' soundcards come up with basic software, so you shouldn't need to cough up any more money for it in the beginning.

Other software: Cubase is nice, and there's nice 'lite'-versions for beginners (some soundcards come with this instead of logic). Cakewalk is quite popular as well.

If you just want audio recording (the aforementioned do MIDI as well), then there's Cool Edit Pro. For free, there's Audacity (audacity does Windows, Linux and Mac) which is proficient enough multitrack audio editor. SLab is a good linux multitrack recorder.

And mp3, well, you don't want to use mp3 for multitrack recording, but most modern software can import mp3-sounds, and output the result to mp3 (some of them [cool edit/audacity] can do ogg as well)

If you want a proper hardware recorder (which are nice, since you can take them to your rehersal space, summer cottage, ..., what have you), then there's plenty to choose from. Most of these are a couple of years old, so you can find them for reasonable prices used (or even new!)

Roland VS-8xx series, they're nice, compact, can do 4-track recording, and 8-track playback. Loads of features, and useful later on even if you grow out of this one. Earlier models had inbuilt harddrives, the later ones have ZIP-drives (if I remember correctly). If you can get one for cheap (and i think you should), then go for this one.

Korg D-8. A bit easier to operate, but quite useful nevertheless.

And i think Fostex had some as well, just keep your eyes open in the pawnshops.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

What about these (mostly third-party) drivers?
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/

please don't hurt me... but I had to do a nonesense post... after all, how hard is audio to setup?

ALSA is just as simple and it's been around and supports most audio solutions (including 99% AC'97 based)

Sound cards
Support media file formats

I'm also evaluating getting a better audio card, but I've had trouble finding decent documentation, even on the boxes - sure, everything does eight-dimensional 12-in-1 audio output, but what's I'm more interested in is the quality of the A/D converter, so when I input sound from analog media (my old vinyl disks and analog tapes) it doesn't lose more than necessary. Are there chipsets to avoid, or to hunt around for?

>With the atitude that the frees/wan project maintains, we will never see freeswan merged with mainstream kernel... hell... they still refuse to take patches from us citiziens and residents (that includes linus)

Not to mention they refuse to include support for the faster (but less secure) type of IPSec, thereby causing me to run Win2k on my router for a short while. I believe they even say it's fully valid to use IPSec in this manner (in fact it's part of the spec, so without it they shouldn't be calling it IPSec, IMHO), but they just don't want to support it in the faq, 100% due to attitude.

Developers may have a right to any attitude they desire, but they should understand their software is just going to be replaced (in the mainstream) by software from someone with less attitude. Let's hope that's what happens with freeswan. I think we don't need another OSS-style crippled set of kernel software. (Did they move to ALSA yet? I hope so!)

Just my 2 cents.

From the ALSA site:

"2002-02-13 ALSA has been integrated to the official Linux 2.5 tree! The initial merge is in patch-2.5.5-pre1."

Yippiee! Great sound, here we come!