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Installing/Configuring ALSA Sound Modules In Debian
GonzoJohn writes "Linux Orbit explains how: "A very common question that comes up when trying Debian GNU/Linux is how the heck do you get Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (a.k.a. ALSA) sound modules set up properly? In this HOWTO we'll show you how to compile and install the ALSA kernel modules, and then setup things using the ALSA Debian script so that modules are automatically loaded and unloaded, and your mixer levels are saved and restored on boot up. Here are some things you'll need to have before you start this HOWTO""
Gentoo Linux has had a similar guide for months, without coverage on the front page of Slashdot. (And, if I may say so, the Gentoo way is cleaner.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but why/how is this news?
No, my RPM-based distro is modern. Debian, let's be honest, has some quite old stuff (Stable, at least).
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
Yea, why is this distro-specific anyway?
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
One of the biggest turn offs for new users to Linux is the general lack of sound support which either
1) Requires recompiling the kernel and crossing your fingers.
2) Requires you to use the beasts known as ALSA and crossing your fingers.
Operating systems are no longer stale command prompts with beeps and blurps -- they are full mutlimedia systems, and having working sound support in the first install should be a priority for Linux distributions.
When Linux newbies have a lack of HOWTOs and sound support is diffuclt to implement, at best they are going to fool around with Linux for a day or two and then go back to their MP3 collection under Windows.
what RPM distribution offers ALSA?
Sound card detection and setup happens invisibly and automatically on several other distributions. Why is this article worth mentioning? What would actually be newsworthy would be some Debian people swallowing their pride and incorporating some of the excellent automatic hardware detection, setup and installation routines that the other distro developers have produced. That's what free and open software is all about, right?
The article tends to mention alot of other HOW-TO's in its introduction and recommend you read them first, then it does into expousing the benefits of using the 2.5.x kernel config.
In other worlds, intereting read.
It does provide information about Sarge and all...
Also,*Note: Britney Spears is not part of the KDREV option, so if you do leave out KDREV it will look like...
That's interesting.
Mandrake for example..
I spent a week getting sound to work on my system by using Google and experimenting. Then they decide to make it easy so that my accomplishment would mean nothing to all of the newbies who show up.
I can hear/see it now:
"Hey guys, do YOU have sound on your system? I do!", I exclaim, with beaming pride.
"Uh, yeah whatever dude," they would say. "I got sound working too. Dumbass."
I can no longer consider myself 1337. B-(
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
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?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Actually I believe the WinME manual is more properly titled "Don't RTFM, we took care of everything for you so you don't have to exercise that little thing you call a brain...oh, and sorry if your card isn't on our list"
A direction I sincerly hope linux doesn't go.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Gentoo tends to be a 'connected distro', and tends towards people with high-speed, always-on connections. You might not like the amount of bandwidth it uses: for instance, a new minor release of KDE (3.0.3 -> 3.0.4) will consume 60 MB alone, but for many it's worth it.
It's (obviously) your call in the end as to how much it's worth to you, but Gentoo is an excellent system. It has killer package management (Portage! -- what other package manager lets you specify compile-time options?), excellent speed (GCC 3.2), and wonderful consistency and customizability.
BTW, the init scripts were crafted specifically for Gentoo; it's neither BSD nor System V.
What's wrong with that approach? Let's see:
You don't learn anything. Learning new things is important to me, if not to anyone else.
Automagically detecting hardware is not an exact science. If all you use is a tool to do something, then you can't fix it if said tool breaks.
Lots of time to read is relative. In the time it takes to read the HOWTO, you could have read the documentation that comes with ALSA and walked away with far more knowledge. You have to learn how to do anything, that's just a fact.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
What do you learn by trying to configure and install a piece of software by following a HOWTO? Other than the location and format of config files, which I doubt is a valuable knowledge?
;-)
I don't know. You could use this time to learn something that is actually useful. Like an interesting programming language, or some theory, or something not related to computers at all. I don't like the face the software FORCES me to use my time to learn its configuration, as opposed to saving me time I could use on what I want. Unless you're a mindless drone who, if not given a configuration problem, just reads Slashdot and chats on ICQ...
Last time I checked, you could override drivers on Windows.
>Doing things the hard way is stupid and that is why people choose Windows.
That's fine. Enjoy Windows. Let me know what your mp3s sound like when DRM takes away your ability to play them. Maybe then you'll read some documentation.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Umm... this how-to appears to be very well written, in fact much better written then the lack of documentation that comes with the package, the last time i setup ALSA it took me about 48 hours mainly because no where was it clearly explained how to do things, it was read as much documentation as you can and try to make up the manual yourself based on what you know from the API. Essentially this how-to is now the manual
- Make sure you have a 2.5.x kernel or above.
- Select your card from a dropdown.
- Retrieve, unpack, and compile source code.
- Install resulting software with a strange command-line utility.
- Retrieve, unpack, and install even more software.
- Edit a configuration file.
- Edit another configuration file.
- Run a script.
- Start a daemon.
Wow. That's so easy! I can see why OS X is the number one selling Unix:
- Go to System Preferences.
- Select "Sound".
- Select "Output".
- Select your high-end audio card.
- Select "Input".
- Select your high-end audio card.
Let's assume that your time is worth $50/hr. After a few hours of struggling to set up sound under Linux, that extra cash for Apple hardware doesn't sound so bad...
GonzoJohn is the person that submitted the story not the moderator!
Hemos is the one that posted it to slashdot
NOW look at all those Windows people giggling and pointing their fingers at us!
(Remember the airplane joke, what the linux people did...)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
It has ALSA built in.
Compiling your own kernel additions is for experimental stuff, not stuff that has been working for years like ALSA
It has killer package management (Portage! -- what other package manager lets you specify compile-time options?)
Dunno if you've heard of it, but there is a package manager called RPM that lets you set compile time options when you are building from source packages.
No, then I'll either go back to my Macintosh (whether it be a new one or an old 8100), or wait for someone to put together a Linux distro that I don't have to fiddle with for days to get it to work. The view point "everyone wants an easy-to-use computer" is just as wrong as the "everyone should do it the hard way" - there's always that pesky group in between...
mrg
I'm sure alsa does lots of cool things, but I never got past the fact that with the oss drivers, I could:
:) WTFIUWT?
$ modprobe es1370
and away I went.
With ALSA, I could load 15 or twenty drivers, and even if I managed to pick all the right ones, the damn things were muted by default!
So.. maybe a howto is a good thing. But why is it so damn complex that it requires a howto?
If your distro picks up, configures and sets your sound up without ALSA then you do NOT have to do this. You can and ogle for playing DVDs requires it but personally on my maestro3 card the sound from the OSS driver is better IMO compared to ALSA.
_ __
In ALSA it sounds sort of tinny and strained, it seems like the plain-jane maestro3 as opposed to the ALSA snd-maestro3 works better at least on my laptop.
I never seem to have trouble with my sound till I start mucking with it by hand. If I accept the distro defaults I am usually better off. This is a good thing for distros by the way. However, this is the exact opposite in terms of XF86Config. It seems like I always find two or three things to tweak manually that the distro-makers miss.
Oh well...
_______________________________________________
ACK
Now I feel REALLY reatarted.
While you're waiting for someone else to put together a distro so that you don't have to think or digging out the old computer which may or may not play new formats or switching to a platform which takes not having to learn to all new heights, I'll be listening to mp3s. Amazing the lengths people will go to to not have to think/learn.
By the way, I am not a "everyone should do it the hard way" but I am cognizant of the benefits reaped from actually reading documentation and being able to learn. Just to add, the HOWTO has nothing that isn't in the ALSA docs. I am not against HOWTOs, I am against HOWTOs that are distro specific and contain no new or helpful information.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
I can't see how this is newsworthy, it's already in your /usr/share/doc/alsa-source/README.Debian.gz. And they use the far simpler make-kpkg instead of building manually with lengthy vars to define that nobody remembers. ;-)
Ok, the big news was indeed: use apt-get install alsa-source and read the manual to get alsa to work on Debian
have you been defaced today?
Absolutely. You want to be looking at soundcards like the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 (what I use), or Terraenc's cards. Others like ones from Digital Audio Labs (DAL), or Echo. None of these names are common, but the chipset in common is the Envy24 chipset: easily one of the best out there in terms of S/N ratio, etc.
I would recommend checking out www.pcavtech.com for actual *real* measurements -- you can see how much of the SoundBlasters are merely marketing hype, and how much is real performance.
As for ALSA support: Midiman/M-Audio's soundcards are all well-supported. I haven't any clue about the others: theoretically, if the chipset is the same or very similar, there should be no complaints, but I wouldn't count on anything...
If your interested in the init scripts, you could just read the Gentoo Init System documentation.
This sound issue, I believe, is very Debian centric, and likely would never come up with Grandma Bessie, who would probably use one of several more user-friendly, desktop-oriented distributions. I use Slackware (not part of that more user-friendly group), and even with that I have never had to read anything to get my sound working.
/Default.asp, line 57
Linux isn't mainstream because people like you assume that "it ISN'T INTENDED, and NEVER WAS INTENDED, to run on the desktop." How very short-sighted of you to assume something so silly. The sad thing is that in a few years when Linux has made major inroads toward that goal, we'll still have your claim in the Slashdot archives to look back on and laugh.
BTW: You should probably have a look at the HOWTO for IIS (running on that vastly superior OS where no HOWTOs are needed?). You've got a bit of a problem at http://beaner.dyndns.org.
* Error Type:
Microsoft JET Database Engine (0x80040E09)
Cannot update. Database or object is read-only.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Since most people only want sound hardware for output, this is probably enough.
If you are looking to migrate away from Cakewalk, Cubase, or Logic to a Linux solution, it's still a pipe dream. Sure there are a million audio projects, but the cubase killer is just not out there, not in the pipeline, and I don't even imagine it's in the cards.
A linux version of Fruityloops would be awesome, and if it were able to host VST applications, it would be of significant value to me.
One other point; I'd like to see a howto that deals specifically with the 2.5 kernel and debian.
The article is clear and concise, and it stops short of telling you how to, say, do multitrack recording, enabling 24/96 recording and mixing, or how to enable hardware synths. It also doesn't give any card specific help (Ice1712 M-Audio cards, anyone?) This is really just a special case of "installing modules" which is documented pretty well, elsewhere.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I have a sound blaster live, and RH 7.3 found it and properly set it up. I am not using ALSA, just the standard driver, but it provides the same functionality as my windows sound card, and I didn't have to RTFM, I just had to PITC (Put in the CD).
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Perhaps after you have done your 100th Linux install, you will find that all this tweaking, man pages, compiling kernels and howtos and crap for basic PC operation is an annoyance.
/. article.
i've installed linux many times on a lot of different machines (generally for friends and friends of friends ever since high school), and have very rarely needed to do any major tweaking just to get things to work. perhaps with obscure hardware sound would be difficult, but at this point major distros seem to get it right. i dont think anyone using those really is forced to read and configure if they dont want to.
when i first put linux on my laptop (back in 1999), i had to read and tweak for an hour or two to get sound to work on the stupid neomagic sound/video card, but once it worked it actually sounded better than it had on win98 (which came with the machine), mostly because the driver for windows had some serious problems. that's when i started to appreciate linux, because with windows there was nothing i could do to fix sound, and after that the amount of work to configure linux seemed trivial.
before claiming that linux isnt ready for the desktop, maybe you should look into it more so you can at least base your decision on personal experience and not on your impression of some
I am against HOWTOs that are distro specific and contain no new or helpful information.
i think i understand your viewpoint; it would certainly be difficult to wade through the list of HOWTOs if there were many superfluous ones. but just because there is little unique information does not mean they are useless. a good HOWTO is likely to be better organized and a gentler and quicker introduction than the full documentation.
i agree that it's better not to have distro-specific documentation, but i'd rather that mean authors try writing documentation that is helpful for all distros, rather than simply not writing about something because it's distro-specific. there are many people using each distro, and there should be useful documentation for them, whether it's helpful to the entire community or just part of it.
what would you do if windows didnt understand your sound card?
Automatically detecting hardware IS an exact science. There is a PnP standard and all modern bioses support it. Why create another layer of complexity. The bios will report exactly what hardware you have to the OS. Then it is a matter of checking for a driver. If there is no driver for the specific PnP ID of a device, then check for the generic PnP ID of the device and install that driver.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
Reading documentation? I work with computers all day long, the last thign I want to waste my time with is reading a howto to find where to add the extra line to a config file to make a sound card work. That shit is tolerable when it comes to configuring a server, but a sound is not critical to a server. It is critical to a multimedia home computer and most IT professionals do not want to have to fiddle with their hoem computer just to make it work. It is a total waste of time.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
Have you taken a moment to think that the location of the configuration files is not learning. It is a waste of time. If you want to learn how computer soundcards work, pick up a book on programming and program the soundcard.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
Get a better sound card.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
Fixed. I am honored that you have taken such offense to my post, as to visit my web site (presumably to 'dig up the dirt'). I would explain the problem to you, but I have no doubt that you wouldn't understand it since it doesn't involve 'perls' and 'apaches'. Do you always spend so much time investigating your online adversaries? If not, I'm honored that you are so obsessed with me specifically.. presumably my post hit some kind of nerve.
I myself am devoid of Microsoft zealotry. It's simply a platform that I and all of my high-paying clients use. I don't have any high-paying clients who use Lunix, except as a cheap web server. Please reflect on your Lunix zealotry, and decide whether it is the best use of your time.
I have been using Linux for at least 4 years. Mandrake 9 is getting close, but it still isn't ready for primetime.
If you fully read my post, you would have noticed that my opinion was based on over 100 installs of various linxes and not some stupid slashdot story or slashdot post.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
I don't know if it'll please a finale power-user, ... or some of the other stuff listed
but linux users who need notation apps might
check out http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/
at http://sound.condorow.net/notation.html
This is misleading and inaccurate.
ALSA does not cause "random crashes of the
machine if you have an onboard sound card."
There have been some buggy chipsets that
can lead to lockups without some driver
workarounds. I have one in my laptop - a NeoMagic 256 A/V (ugh). Takashi Iwai of the ALSA project
invested a great deal of time in responding to
my problem reports and fixed the problems I was
having with that chip.
If you're having problems with ALSA and lockups, it's specific to your soundcard. Try a more recent version of ALSA, and if it's still broken,contact the developers. They want to fix it, but they don't have access to every piece of hardware under the sun.
--PW
Ah yes, PnP will solve everything.
Sure works great on Windows. Never had any problems with it there.
I purchased the commercial OSS drivers about two years ago (maybe less, i don't remember) and believe that they are all around better than the alsa drivers. Don't get me wrong, the alsa drivers are great, but they don't seem to give me the same edge over fine tuning my sound as OSS. Also, i figure that for $30 bucks, those damned drivers had better be superior to ALSA (free as in speech/beer) in every respect. The installation is far superior to anything alsa has to offer. Unzip the tarball, run 'oss-install' and point-n-click your way to sound. I still feel as though I made the right decision. I have a feeling, however, that soon, i will regret purchasing them. (of course, at the time i purchased them, they were pretty much the only decent set of sound drivers available).
And after you've done your 1000th windows install to fix some silly software problem you will see that to use any tool you have to understand how it works.
I spent two years as senior technician in the service department at a major computer retailer. 95% of the problems I saw were caused by windows' inability to protect itsself from itsself. When your system is configured by a honking big binary file (the registry) that must be parsed correctly for the system to start, and then allow any software on the system to write to it, you're asking for trouble.
With Linux you generally don't need to know much more than the average windows user to install and use the system. However when you have a problem you can RTFM and generally fix it. By having many small text files for configuration it's much more difficult to break your system in a way that requires reinstallation rather than repair.
I have heard that windows has gotten more stable, (the last versions I dealt with were 98SE and NT4) but as long as the configuration is based on the registry you can keep it.
Many of you may be wondering, why ALSA made front page news. There are several reasons:
1. ALSA sound drivers are nearly impossible to install.
2. If you want to turn your Linux box into a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) ala TiVo, then you need the alsa drivers and the stuff from the GATOS project.
(See) http://gatos.sourceforge.net/overview.php
I am glad that someone posted the HOW-TO... Alsa has been a big thorn in my side for awhile now. Maybe now I can get the ALSA-Mixer working properly.
Good Luck, and may your all Linux boxes be PVR's!
...or else that guy is extremely dull.
That troll exaggerated the difficulty of installing ALSA on DEBIAN, misrepresenting it as enabling sound on Linux in general. Then he oversimplified OS X. So he is either a flamebait (half-truths and lies, like a politician) or a really dumbass.
Isn't Apple going to release OS X for x86? Well, wait till that happens, then ask that troll/dumbass to run OS X on X86. And I can tell you what is going to happen--he'll have to buy his hardware according to an "approved HW list" published by Apple, and you can bet there are going to be an amazing choice of 3 motherboards and 4 soundcards on that list.
There is nothing insightful or interesting about that post.
Cheers,
e.
Not really, but thanks for the pointer. Generally, good sequencers don't make good music typesetters in much the same way that vim or emacs doesn't make a good LaTeX.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'm filing this one under "Unintentional irony." Thanks!
how to invest, a novice's guide
I don't completely agree with you here. I do agrre in that Debian's efforts to ease the road for the newbies are pretty lackluster, to say the least. However, maybe I'm just insensitive, but I can't say I care too much about that. For power users, there isn't anything close to Debian --anything that I've tried, anyway. That includes several other Linux flavors, Windows, Solaris and MacOS pre-X (I'm really interested to try FreeBSD, Gentoo and MacOS X, but alas, no time).
But that's a feature, not a bug! That's precisely what allows me to build full-featured Debian routers out of old 486 boxes with 240 MB hard disks (no kidding).
You just have to read a little. By now I'm sure you found out that in Debian you don't edit modules.conf directly, but put files in /etc/modutils, which update-modules assemble into a modules.conf file. It's cleaner, easier to maintain, it avoids one package from clobbering other package's modules. If only you manage to get used to it, you'll probably find that there's usually a very good reason behind most of Debian's oddities.
Debian will seldom touch your hand-edited files, if you know where and how to write them. I know, that can annoy a great deal out of an old timer used to edit conf files freely --but then again, Debian's scheme of things allows you to install and deinstall things, and even to upgrade from slink to potato to woody, without worrying about breaking anything. I think that's a good reason to deviate from traditional setups.
Yeah, that is a problem. Again, I don't care much: I use FVWM, and the few GTK/Gnome apps that I need (Mozilla, Evolution, XChat, the Gimp) I installed from Woody and work flawlessly. But I do see someone getting frustrated from the lack of Gnome2 and/or KDE3. I hope someone that actually gets bothered enough by this will go help the guys packaging that stuff --they've been doing it for a long time, and a little bit of help probably won't hurt.
If you've got the right analog equipment, an SB Live! Platinum is actually rather good for what you're after.
The Live! is very well supported in Linux as far as my experience goes, and its analog inputs are pretty good. I don't have any hard figures, but going from my old vinyl to 192kbit MP3 (through LAME) compares *very* favorably to going from CD to same quality MP3 (Perl Jam - Vitalogy on vinyl and CD)
Also, the original Live! Platinum is available for around US$50 if you shop around.
(of course, all this is useless if you're looking for archive quality recording, but moving from your 'El-Cheapo Pretends-To-Be-Soundblaster-Compatible' it'd be an order of magnitde better)
Fine, this ALSA thing is Debian centric, but it's just endemic of a greater problem with linux: ease of hardware configuration. Or even simpler, ease of configuration period.
How much of your hardware is supported? Fully supported? Working?
Is all your software configured properly? Do you even know where to configure the software?
I've been running linux since 94 and I've never once had my system work exactly right. Take for instance my zip drive.
I have to run devfs if I want to use USB, fine. If I use ide-floppy, the zip drive only gets created if there's a disk in it at boot. If I use scsi-ide on my zip drive, then
This is moronic. Say what you will about windows, but at least my hardware works right the first time, and more importantly I don't have to fuck 3 hours with it.
Linux isn't mainstream because people like you assume that "it ISN'T INTENDED, and NEVER WAS INTENDED, to run on the desktop."
*bzzz* Sorry. You're wrong. Thanks for playing. Here's your year supply of Rice-a-Roni "The San Fransico Treat".
Linux isn't a mainstream desktop because quite frankly it sucks. Hardware doesn't always work without major work. (Yes, compiling is major work. Hell looking up that my card uses the 3c905 chipset rather than, it's a "3com Whatever" is a pain in the ass.) The desktop environments are annoying at best. (Nautilus only has "clean up by name option"...)
And then of course you have The Community(tm). Post a bug, and if you're not completely ignored, you get a "Damn you you insolent cur! Fix the thing yourself! If you use it your a developer! I do this for free damn it! Show some resepect!"
First off, I'm a user not a developer. I do not have any intention to learn the inner workings of vector based text rendering to learn why the ghostscript drivers you provided don't work.
Secondly, when you release stuff, expect bug reports. Expect that most people don't really give a damn about how your pet project works, they just want it to work. How arrogant are you that you to think that I'm going to drop everything I'm doing to spend a week to help you. It's your piece of software, maintain the damn thing. Is there a known solution? You could have documented it in the time it took you send the 20 "Fuck you" emails you just sent.
The sad thing is that in a few years when Linux has made major inroads toward that goal, we'll still have your claim in the Slashdot archives to look back on and laugh.
You mean like this article? Or this this comment?
BTW: You should probably have a look at the HOWTO for IIS (running on that vastly superior OS where no HOWTOs are needed?). You've got a bit of a problem at http://beaner.dyndns.org.
* Error Type:
Microsoft JET Database Engine (0x80040E09)
Cannot update. Database or object is read-only.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
You mean like this error I just got on
This isn't flaimbait, this is hilarious, if only for the reference to grandma's PE collection...
-dameron
. . .
. . .
Dude... I think you mean Linux, not Lunix. Lunix is a multitasking, Unix-like operating system for the Commodore 64. It's almost as cool as Linux, but not quite the same.
try the delta audio series by M-audio.
I use them under win for making tracks very good quality/price ratio.
also have it working under linux but havent done much with it as i c cant find a cubae/logic/protools type program for linux yet
If you're really quite serious about A/D quality, look into using an external box for the task. Midiman makes a couple of different, well-performing 24-bit models, and they occasionally pop up on Ebay. Or, you could pick up a nice pawnshop/Ebay DAT or Minidisc deck, and use that.
Not that you need 24 bits to transcribe vinyl, but it does help ensure that you'll not run out of headroom. Later in the process, you can normalize the audio and truncate or dither it down to 16, while preserving every nuance of the album's pops, ticks, and surface hiss.
Plug a box like this into a sound card's SP/DIF input. The stupider, cheaper, more DSP-phobic cards will generally be more likely to do a bit-perfect job of this, such as the $12 Zoltrix Nighingale or other CMI8738-based cards. Along the same lines, do try to avoid anything branded Creative Labs, mmkay? They've got bad habits like irrevocable resampling, and are noisy throughout (even when only doing strictly "digital" things with SP/DIF IO).
That said:
I used to play engineer for a streamed talk radio show. Equipment was limited to the gear in a small project recording studio, none of which was intended for broadcast use, aside from the scrap-built Linux box running liveice and lame.
Since this box needed a sound card, I drove over to the nearest white-box OEM parts dealer and started looking. I picked a YMF744-based (XG) PCI card from AOpen, similar to this one, based primarily on the component count: It was the only card under $50 which was not branded Creative, and appeared to have reasonable analog filter stages and signal paths.
It turns out that this card, along with other Yamaha XG cards, has superb support under ALSA, and that the quality of the converters is not bad.
The control of the card was such that I was able to calibrate it to the output meters on the Tascam console, and monitor the program via digital loopback through its own DAC at 0 gain.
I could then push a button on the console, and switch between monitoring the signal in its original analog state, or after it'd been through a ADC->DAC stage without worrying that varying levels would skew my perception.
In the (somewhat noisy) enviroment I was in, I could hear no difference in overall quality with or without the Aopen card in-line. This cheap sound card was, in a word, transparent, at least for my purposes. Which is all I can ask of any sound card.
ALSA made this easy, but I suspect I'd have trouble doing things so precisely under other operating systems.
But I've noticed that not all XG-based cards are made the same. Hoontech sells, or at least sold a year or two ago, some expensive studio-oriented monstrosities which doubtless sound beautiful. On the other end of things, I've heard some laptops with XG chips which sounded horrible.
Lately, I've been recording my 2-year-old daughter's various noises with an SB Live 5.1. The results are OK, but nothing like what I remember hearing in the studio. I could blame the card's on-board mic preamp or the sound of my apartment, but I fear that shoddy AD plays at least as large a role in the matter.
Good luck.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yeah, I can understand you. I used to feel exactly that way some years ago.
It would be great if someone would find a way of making Linux (and Unix) configuration simpler, while still allowing advanced users to work some magic, without breaking the installer. I mean, I'd love to be able to configure my machine with two clicks of the mouse, but not if that means that I won't be able to insert a couple of scripts to configure my personal mini-firewall, or establish a VPN link to my office, when the net goes up, or something like that. I hope one such solution will be found in the future, but in the mean time, I'd rather read HOWTOs than fight with GUIs.
As for dependencies: there's nothing I can argue. I use libldap, but I'm sure most users don't need it. Don't know why it gets installed a standard (I think SASL pulls them), maybe that should be filed as a bug. As for the 240 MB, uncompressed headers do take quite a bit of space (around 50 MB on my laptop, which has a lot of -dev packages installed). Static libraries take another huge chunk. And I rather install some docs (which also take a lot of space) and leave some 100 MB for logs and temp files (it's just a drag when /tmp or /var fill up, isn't it?)
:-)
Btw, it seems that we're getting Gnome2 on this very Sunday!
I don't want to troll but the Debian community asked the Linux Documentation Project to move the HOWTO's over to the GNU Free Documentation License, ./ article, yet from looking at the Linux Orbit article it appears that the MIDI-HOWTO cannot include any of it's work as there are no indications that this text is opensource.
ALSA, and Linux audio development in general, is making HUGE progress.
Yes, things are still in development, ALSA 0.9 in 2.5 kernel is not meant for wide-scale use, but there are a significant number of very happy Debian users out there and once everything goes stable Linux will be the same ass kicking platform for audio as it is for servers.
The MIDI-HOWTO covers ALSA installation and whilst earlier version were more difficult to install, support for soundcards improves every day making it easier every release.
Phil
For those interested in setting up alsa, note that the modules options file in the article is only valid for alsa 0.9 up to rc3
/etc/modules.conf files by hand or use our alsa-driver/utils/module-options script which does this job. Please, notice that 'snd_' prefix is not equal to 'snd-' prefix (module name) which is left unchanged.
The line
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=4 snd_device_mode=0660 snd_device_gid=29 snd_device_uid=0
wont work with newer versions (for instance Sid has 0.9rc5, an so I guess Testing will have it soon too), because (from www.alsa-project.org)
We have changed the kernel module symbol names (module parameter names). We removed prefix 'snd_'. Please, update your
That means you need to change the previous line into something like:
options snd major=116 cards_limit=4 device_mode=0660 device_gid=29 device_uid=0
Hope this helps
!
^_^
Kalin
Metamuscle.com - News in the Iro
i am an ignorant fool?
He is the one that suggested that Gentoo is the only OS that has a package system that allows you to specify compile time options.
How was my correction ignorant?
SuSE 7.2 (possibly earlier) through current (8.1) supports ALSA. I haven't made extensive use of it but it has satisfied my XMMS needs for a while.
SuSE is an rpm-based distribution, but not RedHat based, compared to Mandrake for example.
Thanks for the name correction RMS. Expect the telegram later today - it'll read, "NOBODY FUCKING CARES EXCEPT YOU STOP."
Why does linux make everything so damn hard. I use linux, but only because I believe in free software and right now its the only real provider capable of doing what I want to do. But it is so outdated it just bugs me. Somebody needs to take these suggestions, and actually think for a second about how much better linux would be if they were just implemented (also I have running about 4 linux desktops and 2 linux servers, so I'm not a super mega linux geek, correct me if I have an off point here):
1) Why does everything have to be compiled into the kernel. What? Can the kernel not map shared objects into its memory space? And if it can't, why not?
2) Why don't they establish only standard APIs that device drivers have to implement (seperate of the kernel and not built into some stupid x-windowing system or something irrelevant to what it does example: sound drivers for KDE), i.e.:
OpenGL - graphics library
OpenAL - audio library
insert appropriate nic standard
insert appropriate printer standard, etc. and make the stupid x-windowing system just another interface that runs on top of OpenGL, jeez.
3) The everything is a file mechanism is really getting outdated. Why are there not object oriented shells yet? Come on, just pop a javascript shell in there, make ObjectInstantiators/ObjectSerializers that detect file types and convert to the appropriate object instance, so javascript can instantiate it, use it, serialize it back to disk, and then move on.
4) Why do we still use program based architectures? Programs are way too linear. We need objects and an object handling mechanism (like javascript or something similar to it, like a Delphi UI or something) not programs. Once you make a program things get hard coded in that make it too specialized to be used in anything other than what it is designed for, if everything was just an interactive object, you could chain them together and do all sorts of neat tricks, that you could never dream of with standard file based shells/programs. And then you could serialize these object webs you create to disk for use as kind of a template(I'd say program but you could easily modify these to fit your needs). Sounds way better than standard file based scripts to me. Although javascript scripts sound nice too.
5) If we are going to be using a program/file based OS, lets make the program names intelligible. Lets see: vi, emacs, joe (joe??? what the hell man), yast, lilo, initrd, sh, etc., etc.. Come on guys name your programs something intelligible, and leave the credits in the fscking readme file. At least if dos had something it had convenient keywords (copy, rename, delete, deltree, EDIT). I realize I could make symlinks to my hearts delight, but that is only assuming you know what the program your looking for is called.
6) Why did anybody think it would be a good idea to integrate the inetd with the x-windowing system (xinetd). Yippee, all the speed of NT servers on a linux system. Of course thats assuming you use inetd to begin with.
7) This one is for the distros: quit using the damn graphical installers. Graphical installers don't make installing any faster (quite to the contrary in a lot of cases), and in installing on older hardware a lot of times it makes it nearly impossible. I'm all for straightforward installers, but you don't have to be in a graphics mode to do it (fine standard VGA modes will work)
8) Hey I got a fun idea, lets put all those binaries in one directory, with no real index as to what each of these programs with obfuscated names do, and then lets give no easy way to find out what it does short of running it. Woo! And don't say, "One word, man" or "info" those systems are pretty fucked up as it is.
9) Standardize the damn locations, follow the LSB biatches.
10) This may sound contradictory to the above, but... abolish the Unix file system layout. I can't stress enough how a simple object persistence/serialization mechanism would be way better than a file system any day. Anyways, those are just my rants/suggestions as to what needs to be changed or layered on top of the linux filesystem if they wanted it to actually be a BETTER OS than windows or MacOS.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
It's because Debian is preferred by the editors, silly.
And since when did Debian alone revolutionize the way people think about closed vs. open source? Did I miss a meeting?
Don't be a fanatic, please.
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
Or just list every module you want to be loaded in /etc/modules, one per line with parameters, and they will be loaded at the boot. Which is good, because I never understood what the hell the stuff in modules.conf means. Pure and simple and working stuff, even when not using kerneld sounds proto-neolithic. =)
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