[alsa-devel] sbxfi - What works/doesn't summary

[Takashi Iwai]

At Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:33:19 +0000,
Jason Harvey wrote:
> 
> Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > At Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:40:40 +0000,
> > Jason Harvey wrote:
> >   
> >> The Source wrote:
> >>     
> >>> You can't hear desktop sounds because they always use pulseaudio no 
> >>> matter what sound system you select as default. For me pulseaudio 
> >>> plays first sound fine after start, others are corrupt along with 
> >>> sound from all other apps. I'll post hw_params later. Also pulseaudio 
> >>> tends to crash often with this driver so I suppose your problem is the 
> >>> same.
> >>>       
> >> Can confirm that once pulse (on FC9 at least) gets involved it sounds 
> >> terrible.
> >>
> >> I worked out that I had removed a package pulseaudio-esound-compat at 
> >> some point in the past and never realised that it contains the symlinks 
> >> that gets Gnome to start the pulse server.
> >> Once that was fixed the desktop effects started working but only out of 
> >> my USB headset... and nothing I can find in the gui lets me do anything 
> >> about it.
> >>     
> >
> > In many cases, the pulse problem comes from the in accurate DMA position
> > calculation.  PA is often too aggressively updating buffers.
> >   
> Thanks, I knew there was a reason I stripped pulse out of this machine 
> when I installed FC9.
> Is that a bug in pulse or is it something that will improve with the 
> sbxfi driver?

Basically it's a bug of the driver.

> >> mplayer and firefox/flash sound terrible, very tinny and scratchy.
> >> This is with the base_rate=48000 option set in modprobe.conf
> >>     
> >
> > Do you mean a regression with 48kHz in comparison with 96kHz?
> >
> >   
> Sorry that was a bit ambiguous, I'd never tried 96kHz.
> Have just changed base_rate to 96kHz and it performs identically to 48kHz.
> Pulse mangles the sound in just the same manner at 48kHz or 96kHz.

Ah, so you meant mplayer/flash with PA backend?

> While I was poking about in my alsa configuration I noticed that there 
> is no /etc/alsa/cards/SBXFi.conf
> I think pulse looks for it, get errors shown after running pulseaudio -vv
> ALSA lib confmisc.c:1286:(snd_func_refer) Unable to find definition 
> 'cards.SBXFi.pcm.surround51.0:CARD=0'  
> Would that make any difference to anything?
> (Sorry if pulse issues are totally off-topic)

It just tries to non-existing configuration, and you can ignore it.


Takashi