This is a Dell mother board running squeeze which needs
to record from two sound cards simultaneously and it can do that
but things are not rosey or I wouldn't be bugging the rest of you
for suggestions.
I discovered that the second sound card which was an
ensoniq, apparently is not fully reachable from alsa. It seems to
be impossible to crank up the input gain enough to get full
digital audio. You can set everything full blast (100%) and feed
the Line input to distortion and the output samples reach maybe
60 or 70% of what they should read plus one can twist
all the virtual knobs that should effect recording level and the
result ranges from making things worse to no effect at all.
I replaced the card with a SoundBlaster AWE64 gold which
thanks to indirection possibly influenced by the Lunar phase or
the direction I face while I work, starts out okay. The dmesg
output shows:
01:01: card 'CS4236B'
01:02: card 'Creative SB AWE64 Gold'
isapnp: 2 Plug & Play cards detected total
That is the way things should be but not how they turn out.
Do nothing at all and aplay -l shows:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CS4236B [CS4236B], device 0: WSS [CS4236B]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
It should have also shown something about card 1, the
AWE64 but it's a no-show.
I tried to help things along with udev rules for both
cards as in the following 2 lines in
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:
#card 0 mother board sound chip
options snd_CS4236 index=0
#card 1 external SBAWE64 gold which looks like SB16 in Linux
options snd-sb16 index=1
No change so let's try making CS4236 card 1 and the SB is card 0.
options snd_CS4236 index=1
options snd-sb16 index=0
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: S16 [Sound Blaster 16], device 0: SB16 DSP [DSP v4.16]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
That's interesting. Now we see the SoundBlaster and the CS4236
went poof! What should I look at next?
Honestly, when Linux sound works, it is fantastic but
there sure are a lot of these non-obvious issues that one can
bang their head on for ever and not really understand. Is ther a
better udev rule for the AWE64 Gold that will finally make things
just work as expected?
It's possible that there is a jumper in the wrong place
on the card causing a contention issue since PNP sees it but
nothing else seems to run right.
Thanks for any constructive ideas.
Martin McCormick
