On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, at 8:59pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> My sound card (an old Ensoniq ES1370) blew the other day, so I'm >> looking for a new card. Can anyone make a recommendation for a good >> sound card these days? > > ALSA has a vendor matrix of what they support. > > http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/
ALSA has a web page that lists some cards and some drivers. Any similarity that has to actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental. ;-) Well, I'm not being entirely fair. A good deal of the blame lies with Creative Labs. They apparently use a dart board to name their products, and guard their data sheets like nuclear launch codes. But it doesn't help that half the pages on the ALSA website result in PHP fatal errors, and the rest is out-of-date or lacks vital information (like model numbers or chipset types). I know this is vital information because... well, it's a long story: I tried a sound card off-the-shelf from a local merchant. The box said it was a "Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit". The "lspci" output said it was an "Audigy LS". Both of those are listed as working in the ALSA matrix. Given the PCI ID, I expected I needed the Audigy LS driver. That, and the fact that the emu10k1 driver for the SB Live series didn't work. However, I had a fair bit of trouble finding the alleged "audigyls" driver. Near as I can tell, it doesn't exist in FC3, which is pretty recent. Well, wouldn't be the first time Red Hat left something out. I ended up downloading pristine sources for kernel 2.6.10 and ALSA 1.0.7. The kernel built and booted fine, but the ALSA build kept crapping out with fairly basic syntax errors. I was eventually able to work around that by excluding the broken stuff (which I didn't need anyway (I think)). Once I had an "audigyls.ko" file, I tried loading it, and it found nada for cards. I eventually discovered that this card has a CA0106-DAT chip, which apparently has nothing to do with any of the products previously released under the "SB Live" or "SB Audigy" brands. Then I found a page in the ALSA Wiki that implied the chip *does* work, in ALSA 1.0.6a even. But my card didn't. Then I found a webpage that pointed me to some guy's personal directory that had a patch that said if I applied it to an ALSA CVS snapshot... right. Card went back to the store. This is about the same time I read that Creative Labs isn't really supporting F/OSS anymore. The usual trouble with no specs, no docs, NDAs, parting the Red Sea, etc. So now I'm looking for a card that (1) works and (2) is made by a company which is at least not hostile to their customers. I suspect I'm dreaming, but hey, at least it's a Linux-related dream. ;-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
