Lo, on Sunday, March 3, Rick Macdonald did write: > On Sun, 3 Mar 2002, Richard Cobbe wrote: > > > Greetings, all. > > > > New sound card (actually, new computer). It's a SoundBlaster Live!, so > > I've compiled in support for the emu10k1 module. > > > > Up-to-date potato, kernel 2.2.20, SMP. > > > > In general, everything works fine, except that sending .au files to > > /dev/audio has really lousy sound quality. You can hear the sound, but > > there's a loud hissing or static sound on top of it.
<SNIP> > I wonder if it's meant to work. "cat english.au > /dev/audio" on my system > also sounds horrible, but the same file sounds fine when played with > xanim, esdplay or "play". I actually don't know where "play" came from. > "bplay", from the bplay package, sounds horrible just like cat does. You're apparently right -- play works quite nicely on the same file. I'd be interested in learning the differences between play and catting to /dev/audio, but I'm not going to worry about it too much. I have a quick way of playing .au files, and that's really all I'm after. > I think cat'ing the file _used_ to sound OK on the old sound card (SB16) > that I had before the the SBLive. Yeah, the same file sounded good on the sound hardware in the previous machine. I'm a little unclear on details, but I think it was a cheap SB16 knockoff. (Exact modules info elsewhere in the thread.) Thanks for the advice, Richard