PCI Sound Card Recommendations for Linux?

Yet Another Anonymous Coward asks: "The most recent "Ask Slashdot" about sound cards is over a year old and pople were suggesting SB16 and AWE, then. Now, I think it's time to move to PCI sound cards. Which ones do you all recommend."

Comments

Trident 4D Wave NX

[Eric Sharkey]

I think, from what I've read, the best buy for general use today are those cards based on the Trident 4D Wave NX chipset.

They're relatively inexpensive, have fancy features like digital output, are well supported under Linux, and are produced by a company which has not only released full technical documentation for these cards (without any silly NDA's), but fully GPL'd Linux drivers have been written and released by Trident themselves. You can't ask for much more than that.

Check out those made by Hoontech for example.

See John Fulmer's lengthy review.

Re:Trident 4D Wave NX

[kijiki]

www.alsa-project.org -- This has an excellent driver for the 4D wave. Plus, Alsa beats the hell out of OSS.

Please dont buy an SB Live

[Ekman]

The only way to convince Sound Blaster to change its policy is to make a dent in its bottom line. Sure, there are drivers for Linux, but what about the *BSD's?

Do the whole open-source community a favor:

• Buy a different card from a friendlier company.
• Don't buy an SB Live.
• Send Sound Blaster some polite feedback. Tell them you considered buying an SB Live, but decided against it because of the lack of open-source drivers and programming specs. Tell them what sound card you did buy.

If enough people send polite, intelligent feedback, Sound Blaster will have little choice but to release the specs. Until then, please don't buy an SB Live!

Re:SB Live

[kcarnold]

FYI: If anyone following this is too lazy to find the site themselves (and all too many of us are), the website in question is http://developer.soundblaster.com/linux .

Kenneth Arnold

Alas- "Ensoniq Is Now Creative Labs"

[Jon Palmer]

Looks like they've been swallowed up by the notoriously Linux-unfriendly Creative Labs.

I just looked for the Ensoniq card at Shopper.com and it came up as Creative Labs Ensoniq Audio PCI sound card. Three places have it in stock for $15 or less.

Checked the Ensoniq.com site and they "are now the OEM business unit of Creative Labs"..."we will continue to provide web based support to those end customers who purchased Ensoniq soundcards directly from Ensoniq. (at least for the next few months until Creative's customer service department is trained on the product)."

The site has Windows drivers for the "Ensoniq Audio PCI card", and a warning that they won't work with the "Creative Labs Ensoniq Audio PCI card".