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Actually, if you check ardour out, you'll see that its audio interfacing is done through JACK, an audio interfacing layer that uses ALSA. And, of course, ALSA supports pretty much all the sound hardware that matters (i.e. not some of the stuffier manufacturers' cards). In fact, I'm testing it out at the moment on a Hoontech 4DWave/NX card.

Now I just have to figure out how to get it to record in stereo. =)

Did you have a sound card that didn't work with ALSA?

Do you have a sound card that isn't supported by ALSA?

Really not sure what you mean: Alsa? Jack (same architecture as CoreAudio, oh, and PortAudio does the same thing BTW)? MusicKit? LADSPA?

As far as I know, the best such drivers come from the ALSA project. In truth, there are very few multi-io cards listed as supported yet, but MOTU, Echo Audio, Yamaha and Midiman (as well as a few others) are all listed at least as being under developement. The one exception to this 'in the works' rule seems to be RME which appears to be quite well supported. Unfortunately, I see no mention of DigiDesign.

Actually multi-tracking software is in about the same state as the drivers. The most promising package I've seen is Ardour. Their package seems to be very much modeled after ProTools, at least as far as the interface goes. It supports LADSPA open-source plugins (no VST, RTAS, or DX unfortunately... mostly due to license restrictions). It already supports multi-io and many of your standard features, but lacks some things I consider necesities such as MIDI support (especially the ability to send MIDI clock and operate as a metronome... something I almost always use). None the less, there is a future for Linux and recording. It just, more or less, remains in the future for now.

That's a great link you posted. Even better, it does appear at least 1 is supported under Linux. The ALSA Project's Soundcard Matrix lists support for the Midiman Delta 66, and there's also OSS/Linux beta support for the LynxONE (though binary non-free).

Of course, they'll both set you back 400-500 bucks... Fortunately, the still well-performing Turtle Beach cards have long enjoyed good Linux support.

I would just point out that some of these manufacturers, like Echo Audio, do not cooperate well with the open source crowd. Go look at the ALSA list of supported sound cards before you buy if you want to use it under Linux. I have an Echo Mia card (their cheapest one), and it is good hardware for the money. The drivers under Windows had problems, though. I have recently gotten the new MOTU 896 Firewire pro interface, which is a great box, but Firewire on PCs is still touch-n-go. Anyway, neither one of them works under Linux, which is a PITA for me as one of the Audacity developers.

The Alsa Project claims they don't and never will support software mixing from what I've read. Yet more than 1 app at a time can use my sound card, I assumed it was using hardware mixing.

And old faq can be found here where this is noted, I'm can't see to find anything newer.

One of the big things I know is the integration of the Alsa Sound drivers.

This is quite a big move and I'm glad, the old kernel sound drivers were getting horribly out of date and lacked many features, such as hardware mixing support to name one.

I've been compiling the alsa drivers as modules for the entire 2.4.x series, and am *really* glad I won't have to be doing that any longer. :)

I had no real problems with finding *decent* soundcards for a professional pianist two years ago. In the end, we chose the Midiman M-Audio Delta-66 (and had the machine custom built by Microway -- we'd probably build it ourselves this time). Other nice cards from RME (like the Hammerfall and Digi96 series) were also available. Between the cards supported by 4Front and ALSA, there is really no shortage. This was less true two years ago, but we had no troubles. I guess the M-Audio isn't really high-end, but it is clearly *decent*. We were on a budget for the machine, so going over $600 for the soundcard wasn't really an option.

The M-Audio Delta series are pretty nice. The analog inputs and outputs are contained in a separate breakout box, which makes connections easier and helps reduce electrical noise. The pianist has found the noise levels acceptable for mastering with a good headphone amp and headphones. Ambiant fan noise, on the other hand, is something we never really solved (and hence the headphones), but at least that's not a linux problem. ;-)

The pianist had never used linux before, and by now is something of a zealot. =-) He's been using snd for waveform manipulation (but doesn't use any of the lisp extension capabilities, and I can't blame him for that ;-), and has expressed some frustration at the software available. That said, he hasn't updated his software for 2 years, and thus I have no good information about the current state of affairs.

-Paul Komarek

Take a look at ALSA and the project I mention below, Ardour

I'm considering tackling this problem soon if I have time.

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

Yes but unfortunately they're choices that aren't as convenient and they're generally lacking for people who aren't using it on a server and who aren't command line oriented. I've spent some hours over the past week looking for a Linux to install on my old beige mac and maybe as a second partition on one of my current machines. I looked into mkLinux, PowerPPC Linux, a bit on Yellow Dog and tried to look at Debian but didn't find much Debian PPC-specific help.

I'd love to put a distro on my 603e but can't really find anything that sounds good. mkLinux sounds weak as Apple dumped it and it seemed to have a scientific focus (rather than a user-oriented focus) as well as a minimalist slant, PPC Linux has been mediocre IME - even though they present themselves as a business I suspect it's a few guys doing stuff in their off time. Yellow Dog might be okay, I don't know, but like the others there's no easy install process. I don't want to have to buy a burner to install - how many beige macs came with CD-burners? And I shouldn't have to pay $40 to try out an OS, especially when that's half the worth of the machine I'm putting it on. If there's a way to install over ethernet I couldn't find it and the possibility of installing off another partition on the same machine wasn't elucidated, if it is an option. Even after getting a disc the install is much more complicated than with OS X from my experience with PPC Linux. Then the desktop enviroments, ew! Admittedly, I'm used to ones from a couple years ago but I just brought my iBook into work and you should see the Linux kids and how amazed they were with the whole package. Despite my complaints over specific items in OS X it certainly is easier to use and as featureful as Linux. It misses X10 apps but gains many, many more professional applications. Does any PPC linux offer Altivec acceleration and are there software packages that takes advantage of it? And on OS X, I used Samba to connect to other computers at work and at home through the finder's "Go" command and I can't tell you the first thing about what Samba is. That's a layer of convenience that is definitely missing from Linux.

If someone can show me a PPC compatible Linux that doesn't require an hour to install or lots of futzing about with drivers and settings and has a good, stable, even if barebones desktop environment and has ALSA built-in - terrific, I'm sold. [Please post relevant addresses] Personally, I think Linux would be much better if it had less to offer and instead what it offered was much better. Imagine how much better, how much more of a serious option Linux on PPC systems would be if everyone who worked on the various PPC-oriented packages became focused and worked on just one or two different PPC distributions. Hardware support with no trouble spots! Installation with a single click! Altivec support! God - wouldn't that be a terrific OS? An OS I would pay money to use. Linux' lack of focus and direction has always been it's trouble spot and what has kept many, many people from adopting it.

ALSA has been merged into the development Linux kernel, version 2.5.5-pre1, not 2.5.4 as mentioned in the title. Bad Slashdot editors.. :(
Jaroslav Kysela, a Czech developer paid by SuSE, has worked for years to create and lead the ALSA project. It's GPL - its code has always been intended to go into the mainstream kernel and replace the OSS code. Linus has just done so.
Okay, what does it do: ALSA is just a set of utilities, general code and drivers for soundcards. After 4Front Technologies went commercial with OSS some years ago, Linux did not have supported GPLed soundcard drivers anymore. The commercial OSS-drivers are up-to-date, but those in the Linux kernel are old. A lot of obscure soundcards are currently only supported under Linux by either adding the commercial binary OSS modules, or adding the ALSA modules to your kernel. For example, my Aztech 2320 and Mediaforte cards that wouldn't even work with the legacy Win95 drivers (newer aren't to be found anywhere), nor with the old OSS, but they work very cleanly with ALSA since two years. Believe me, the ALSA codebase rocks. It has been stable for a long time and is good enough to add to your 2.4 kernel yourself. Visit the web site, it's just as easy as compiling any other module. And uh, before you all flood the ALSA mailinglists, start alsamixer first before testing, because all channels start muted as default :)

Alsa has been hoping for kernel inclusion for _quite_ a long time. If you search mailing list archives, this issue has been around for a while, and has been a serious issue since the 2.0 days IIRC.

Some history, Alsa kindof grew out of the enhanced Gravis ultrasound drivers (not to say that you'll find any code lingering.. it just came out of that project).

That said, this will bump up linux sound a quantum leap.

The major thing that caused ALSA to not be included was stability--their API would change drastically and suddenly all the time (which may be a good thing, though it was done VERY suddenly and often without notice). That aside that has stabilized as they approach a 1.0 release.

Note that there are oss compatability functions, and support for tons of soundcards, so don't think that thinks will stop working.

As a matter of fact, you can expect this to really push things forward (yes I'm repeating myself, but I can't stress this enough). Many good sound apps now already require ALSA. if you check out their website (linked in the main story), amongst other info you can find their supported card matrix.

I tip my hat to the ALSA team, for their great work and perseverance. thanks a million!! We can all look forward to better sound (more features, lower latency, more flexible API, everything you want) now =)

For more information on ALSA, visit http://www.alsa-project.org/ as posted within the article body.

Try this FAQ

Alsa supports the yamaha ymf724. go get it and quit bitching.

The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.

The Alsa Soundcard Matrix shows all Audigy cards greyed out - which is "support is undetermined as yet".

That's saying that they don't have the specs and don't know if the card will be ever supported. My guess is yes, but not right now...

Indeed, you won't have a problem deciding which driver to use, because there aren't any.

(at least according to this and this)

I attended the Device Driver session at Warpstock, presented by Oliver Stein of IBM Germany. Firewire support for hard drives is coming soon. Also an OS/2 port of ALSA - think SDD for Audio.

My short Warpstock Report is available in the OS/2 forum at IWETHEY, where later down in the thread is information on a wireless NIC with OS/2 drivers :-)

That would be ALSA.

The VIA via82c686 chipset IS supported by alsa

I don't know about you, but I've found from personal experience that multimedia playback is on average very poor in Linux. I mean there isn't a decent Divx ;-) player anywhere.

Oh, you haven't tried MPlayer then. It's an excellent DivX ;-) / MPEG / AVI / ASF / etc. player. It plays DivX files flawlessly. The best part is the cool keyboard control.

As for audio I have a SbLive! and I have it correctly configured in every way in both windows and linux. Windows audio playback with the same speakers and extremely similar configurations is just far superior

The Windows audio playback is probably using the advanced futures of the Em10K chipset. Programming info for the DSP is sadly not free, and thus not available to Linux users, hence no advanced sound features. But this isn't Linux's fault.

In linux I get noise and distortion and just crappy sound

Have you tried the ALSA drivers with it? It might give you better quality.

-adnans

From reading the Linux Audio mailing list, I can offer a quick summary: There is pretty decent hardware support for a variety of pro audio gear. See below. The software side is not quite so good. As one poster put it: "The problem is not a lack of developers for Linux Audio. The problem is that instead of two or three 90% complete software packages, we've got twelve or fifteen 20% complete packages."

That might be a little pessimistic, but there's some truth to it. However, there is usable software out there, even if it is not done. Broadcast 2000 was aimed at video editing, but was apparently useful for audio as well. Ardor is a hard disk recorder package. There's a lot of stuff out there - heck, just search Google and Sourceforge.

The ALSA project http://www.alsa-project.org/ is an important site if you are looking for pro audio Linux drivers and software.

Now, about the hardware: http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/ is a place to start.

Also check out http://www.boosthardware.com/LAU/Linux_Audio_Users _Guide/

The M-Audio pro hardware has a lot of good cards - everything from an inexpensive 24 bit / 96 Khz DA /AD card all the way up to the 10 channel Delta 1010, suitable for real pro / recording work. These cards have Linux support, and is probably your best bet for really good AD / DA and Midi under Linux.

The RME Hammerfall card is also supported under Linux. Other quality hardware (from Echo and other companies) is unfortunately not so well supported.

Personally, I'm planning on getting one of the M-Audio cards just for playing with.

2) I'm going on secondhand information, but I've generally heard better things about IBM drives than Seagate ones.

3) Use the Hoontech Digital 4DWave NX. A hardware manufacturer that actually *supports* Linux, releases all the specs on their hardware, has really good Linux drivers (look at ALSA), hardware mixing...

5) Logitech also makes a line of excellent optical mice, if like me you dislike MS products. There's this really neat one that has an intense blue light-up logo on top...

6) Mushkin's my favorite memory vendor. I've seen sub-par RAM be a PITA to diagnose twice now...top of the line RAM is worth the few extra dollars. Unless you've got an older system, getting marginal memory that doesn't *quite* work with your new motherboard is a real risk.

8) Arctic Silver II? You really *don't* need it
unless you're overclocking. It might make a degree of difference...but, to quote Half-Life, it's "well within acceptable limits" running without thermal compound.

Also....

*) Use *3com* network cards. Really. Not for any hardware advantage, but the drivers are solid, and there are serious flaws in at least a fair number of Linux network drivers. In both the tulip and rtl8139 NIC drivers, I've found that the driver *fully* resets the card when a transmit fails (produces a collision) 16 times in a row. Basically, that means that on nonswitched network segments under *extremely* heavy load, you'll get lots of "transmit timed out" messages, and then you'll lose network connectivity for a second or so for each ocurrence. I read up on this, and these are not unique to me. This can make Linux totally unusable on the network. 3c59x doesn't exhibit this problem.

Also, if *I* submit a proposal for IBM to buy me my dream computer and mention "Linux" somewhere in there, does that mean that they'll buy *me* one from that 1 billion dollars allocated for open source too?

I definitely agree with you though, the PE people's work is exciting, and much less of a hack than the low-latency patches. Way to go hackers!

I definitely agree with you though, the PE people's work is exciting, and much less of a hack than the low-latency patches. Way to go hackers!

If you want the emu10k1 to work properly you'd better just go try ALSA. In my ideal world ALSA will merge with the 2.5 kernel, but I wouldn't put money on it.

Not 100% sure, but in a lot of cases installing updated kernels (NOT the default installation kernels themselves) will result in unaccelerated graphics. So if you are recompiling from source make sure you turn on DRI. Then...

Basically you must recompile the ALSA 0.5.11 modules and reinstall them. Don't use the ALSA beta drivers, they don't work.

If your /etc/modules.conf file doesn't include the needed aliases for your sound card, change them to fit (should be on by default). The ALSA home page should help if you need it.

Good luck.

Here's a site:
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa/tools-source/ac3d ec/.

• It's part of the Linux Video project, which describes it as "completely useless to 99.99 percent of users out there. It is mostly of use to those interested in audio coding research and evaluating codecs."
• There's an XMMS plugin for it.
• It's also part of the ALSA project, which chances are provides your sound drivers if you're using one of several popular Linux distributions.
• RPMFind also has RPMS for it (try rpmfind ac3dec!)

Before someone accuses me of being a karma whore - I'm already over the cap and sinking towards 50 fast!

1. If you're willing to get a year-old machine, almost any distribution will support almost all the features on any Sony, IBM, or Dell. Specifically we have had good luck with all IBM ThinkPads, Dell Inspirons, and Sony Vaios.
2. The best machine for the ultimate power user is unquestionably the Dell Inspiron 8000. The 1600x1200 display works perfectly in X4. Many of our university astronomer customers opt for this system. For a powerful machine that you can port around daily, the IBM ThinkPad T20 series is expensive, but very nice. Its 1400x1050 display works perfectly in Linux. Both of these machines have an Intel eepro100 ethernet which works perfectly in Linux. They both have the Lucent winmodem which can also be made to work in Linux. They both have CDRWs which will burn CDs in Linux.
3. By far our most popular machines are the Sony Z505 and R505 machines which weigh 3.75 pounds and are still very fully featured. APM can be a problem with these systems, but X runs at 1024x768, the USB floppies work, the memory sticks work, and they also have the internal eepro ethernet. Their winmodem is worthless in Linux.
4. Of extreme popularity lately has been the Transmeta Crusoe chipped Sony PictureBook (C1VN/C1VP). It weighs just over two pounds and also runs Linux very well. The camera works. Due to its small size, it does not have internal ethernet, serial or parallel ports.

Kernel: linux-2.4.7 + 2.4.8-pre-3 + kerneli patch (kernel.org)
Sound: alsa-0.9.0beta5 (www.alsa-project.org)
PCMCIA: pcmcia-cs-3.1.27 (www.pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.org)

My personal machine upon which I have done all of my development work for the past year is the IBM T21. The person who does all of our web and Perl development uses the small C1VN. My wife, who has to carry her computer in a backpack all over downtown Atlanta, uses the Z505.

Get a soundcard that does hardware mixing. The Trident 4DWave NX series of cards do this quite nice and cheap. You get 32 audio devices to play with (i.e. you can open up to 32 audio apps simultaneously). Of course you can run esound as one of the 32 to increase this in software. The Live! cards supposedly do this too. All this with ALSA drivers of course.

-adnans

The project is led by Guenter Gieger who is the developer of the Linux low latency driver for the RME Hammerfall 96xx series. Combined with realtime kernel patches, the Hammerfall card in Linux can achieve hardware level latencies.

• Not "realtime" patches to the kernel. The patches in question are "low latency" patches that decrease scheduler latency. They have nothing to do with RTLinux or "hard realtime" programming.
• Guenter didn't write the "native" digi9652 driver, Winfried Reitsch did that. Guenter hacked Pd to use the driver. There is also an ALSA driver for the Hammerfall (I wrote it) that was based loosely on Winfried's driver.
• "hardware latencies" is a loose term. lets just say that a properly written application can use any audio interface via ALSA to get audio i/o latencies that are bounded only by the h/w design.
• I don't think Guenter started Demudi, but I think he may be those most active developer involved in its evolution. Most active by far, in fact.

If you are a developer working on or interested in Linux audio software, I also encourage you to check out the Linux Audio Development web site.

Oh, I don't know. I'd kind of like to see this replace OSS as the UNIX standard.

I have a SBLive! Platinum and a DTS2500 Speaker System that includes a Dolby Digital Decoder, and under Windows it really rocks, under Linux with Xmovie I just get Stereo sound.

Anybody knows of a project to bring AC3 to Linux? ALSA is planning to include it after the release of version 0.6 but what about OSS drivers?

- german

But I mean, even if I wanted to get Cubase VST Linux and chain it through a Darla or some other medium to high end soundboard, where's the support in Linux? There's precious little- OSS is almost the ONLY viable solution to most problems...
check out www.alsa-project.org, you will see that Echo refuses to release product specs to the open source community. grrr.

oops, bound to make a mistake: alsa drivers

---

The way you approach the problem will depend on whether you're primarily interested in telephony or audio. The concepts are similar, but the hardware and drivers come from different sources, and are optimized quite differently.

I can't provide any suggestions from the telephony side, but if you're interested in multichannel audio, check out the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) project. Unlike the older "OSS" sound drivers for Linux, ALSA has a significant amount of support for multichannel audio hardware. Although it is not a particularly mature project, it is reasonably well supported, and is used by nearly the entire professional audio community under Linux (such as it may be).

So your big alsaplayer advantage is shot...

Really, I implemented this backward playing just to see if I could :) .. There's no advantage to it, it's just funny. Oh, and alsaplayer was the first GPL player to play stuff backwards, so there! :)

Oh yeah, on most Be systems soundplay can play about 30 mp3's backwards, forwards, and at different speeds... simultaneously, and without skipping.

How about 36 simultaneous songs *without* skipping backward/forward on my Trident NX using alsaplayer and ALSA on Linux? Of course this multiple simultaneous song playing is TOTALLY useless in real life, but hey, it's nice for articles right? I wish Be people (I was one once :) would venture a little outside their OS domain...BeOS is loosing its uniqueness every day (boy was it cool, back in 1996!)

-adnans

Bill - aka taniwha
--

Indeed. I rarely post here to Slashdot, but I think that people should give more credit where credit is Due.

I'm an avid Debian GNU/Linux user (and I do intend to be a Debian Developer if I can in the near future), but I can't help but recognize all the good things that SuSE Linux has been paying kernel hackers for.

They seem to be incredibly commited to the Free Software movement, yet they get very little credit.

Indeed, people wouldn't have support for many high-end devices and methods if it were not for the support that SuSE is putting into Linux. I won't mention all them, but there are some of the things that I remember:

• Funding for development of drivers for X;
  
• Funding for development of ReiserFS;
  
• Funding for the Alsa Project;
  
• Funding for IDE/ATA Drivers.
  

Many people need those things (which shows the relevance of the support) and I'm sure that there are many other projects with which SuSE may be involved. Congratulations!

Roger...

It seems that SuSE is so involved in many projects out there, and doesn't get much credit. And they don't have a very large market share on the distribution level either. My favorite thing that they help a lot in is The Alsa Project (great sound drivers). SuSE certainly deserves more credit for helping keep Linux on the bleeding edge, so I just thought I'd toss that in.

Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto

<Disclaimer>
I work for LinuxCare.
</Disclaimer>

This service is currently being offered by Linuxcare Labs. We currently offer vendor nuetral product certification designed to demonstrate compatibility with the Linux kernel and other major subsystems of a GNU/Linux operating system environment. Working in this capacity I have learned about many of the challenges that come with trying to provide independent validation of Open Source based product.

There are many challenging questions to answer when certifying Linux/Open Source based products. For example, which distribution are tested against by default? How do you treat hardware that is only partially supported, i.e. 3D video acceleration, USB, fire wire, etc. How do you make a hardware vendor understand that the certification of their products depends on external factors over which they have no control, i.e. distribution packaging practices or the ability or willingness of Free Software developers to write a driver? Do you require everything to work "out of the box" or do you allow post installation configuration steps to be taken? For example, many sound cards on the market today won't work after a default installation of most distributions, and require that you download, compile, and install the latest version of ALSA to support the card.

Answering these questions is a constant balancing act between meeting the needs of the product vendor and delivering a true benefit to the consumer. In the end, certification loses its value if strict standards are not adhered to. However, at this point in the game it is difficult to convince a vendor to even consider investing in having their products tested under Linux without making it a very attractive proposition for them. What this usually translates to is going the extra mile to "make" a product work. When Linux compatibility testing is no longer optional for computer product vendors, the burden of finding out and documenting how to support a particular product will be shifted to the product vendor.

My best recommendation would be to go to the ALSA Project web page. They deal with the creation of drivers for a lot of sound cards. I'm not sure if your particular version is supported, but it's worth a try. My Sound Blaster live was available. Maybe you can ask the coders about support if it doesn't. Does this sound card support other formats? Does it have features like Sound Blaster 16 compatibility or something along that line? Just a thought...

• Help the cause for producing a 100% free open-source DVD playback solution: ac3play
  
• Buy a copy of LinDVD. I'll wait and see WHAT and HOW it does its stuff. Is it distribution agnostic? Non-x86 users probably want support for their CPU, etc.
  
• Buy a hardware DVD decoder board. SigmaDesigns new Netstream 2000 comes to mind.
  
• Burn all my DVD's and go back to VHS.
  

There only real limitation is that, right now, AC-3 forwarding will probably only work on Trident 4DWave NX based cards like the Soundtrack Digital NX. This is no incident since Trident has released ALL of their soundcard documentation to us. The SBLive! card should support AC-3 forwarding, as soon as Creative releases more documentation that describes the S/PDIF interface in detail. RME cards will probably be next on the list of fully supported S/PDIF cards.

I have had great success with playing full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound from within Linux using an external decoder (Matrix baby!). This is one less hurdle in getting good DVD support in Linux (excuse the blatant shameless plug :-)

Check out ac3play and alsaplayer

-adnans

If all you want to do is grab the audio stream going to your sound device, you can use the ALSA (http://www.alsa-project.org) drivers for that.

Basically you do: cat /proc/asound/card1/pcmloopD0S0p > sound.raw

Once your sound sample has finished playing you cancel the above operation and then use 'sox' to convert the raw audio format to .wav or whatever. eg. sox -r 20100 -w -s sound.raw sound.wav

The only problem I had with this is that the sampling rate of the RA stream is not one accepted by any of the MP3 encoders I could find, so I'm stuck with big ugly .wav's.