Hello Marcel,
* Marcel Donker ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [990426 01:59]:
> Hi again,
>
> I've got my SoundBlaster PCI64 working last night. Took me a while, but
> on the way learned a lot about Linux and compiling kernels etc. It gets
> nicer every day!
Yay!
> But, I still have a little question. The soundcard works o.k.. I tested
> it with a cd-player program and it played my audio cd's alright. Then
> tested it by playing some .au sounds with cat 'soundfile.au >
> /dev/audio' and it also played the sound alright. But it didn't play
> other sound formats like .wav files (only a lot of noise). I know that
> .wav is a M$ Winblows sound format, but on the other hand KDE only uses
> .wav sounds as systems sounds (??). I can't get them to play either.
/dev/audio expects 8hz A-law compressed data. .wav files are headered
multi-format audio files. Most are PCM (normal audio data to most
people), but they can be other types. PCM .wav files should be able be
played to /dev/dsp, which takes PCM. Of course, the device is not going
to understand the header, nor will it know the rate, so you might get a
bit of static followed by the sound playing at the wrong speed. Better is
to use a sound player which sets up the driver for you.
As for sound in KDE, uncomment the following lines in
/opt/kde/bin/startkde:
#startifaudio kaudioserver
#startifaudio kwmsound
Note that these lines are commented because they can cause trouble on some
machines due to some compilation issues. They work fine for most people.
> - Or is there something to install which translates these sounds into
> .au-sounds.
SoX will do it, among others.
> - is .au the defacto sound 'standard' under linux/unix? (I know it is a
> Sun format)
I don't think so. Multi-platform UNIX people used to use .au heavily, but
many Linux people these days have more PC heritage than UNIX heritage.
Besides, .au's sound quality is pretty bad.
There are probably some reasonably simple, non-cpu-intensive
sound-compression algorithms, but no one has created a widely used format
like this. As a result, uncompressed PCM is in vogue, and .wav files have
as usable a header as anything else, so you'll probably see a lot of
these.
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Marcel
No problem,
-josh
--
To get out of this list, please send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e
Check out the SuSE-FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/ and the
archive at http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html
