Which USB-Soundcards work?

[Barry Bouwsma]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:56:25 +0100, Paul Kaletta wrote:

> can anybody tell me which USB-Soundcard are known to work with FreeBSD?

I have success with the Hercules Pocket Muse 5.1 Big Knob, with
some caveats.  (It's also the only one I've tried so far.)


> (For example I'm pretty interested in the Creative SoundBlaster Live!
> 24BIT USB. It's pretty cheap (50 EUR), and my past experience with PCI

Give me a day or three and I can probably tell you something about
a different Creative USB card, probably less than twice the price...


> I want a USB-Card since my notebook lacks a line-in jack. It has a
> microphone plug only. Does recording work with USB-cards? I don't need
> anything fancy, but when I'm recording noise should be reasonably low.

With the above-mentioned Hercules card (probably EOL'ed), I was able
to record, with 4.x and patches (probably incorporated into -current,
submitted as 4 PRs).  I didn't record any serious sources, but just
recorded the sound of me connecting and disconnecting a cable to the
mic and line in jacks (clicks and buzz) to verify it worked.

Noise, hmmm, well, I looked at the recorded data from this card and
it is not that quiet, compared to some other cards.


About this particular card -- the only supported sample rate is the
professional rate of 48000 samples/sec.  So I had to hack the other
utilities I use, to convert other rates to 48000 -- for my own use,
I make 48000kHz sample recordings so playback of my own material has
been no problem.


As a rule of thumb, I'd suggest searching for reviews on-line, and
seeing what the reviewer has to say.  Often I'll read reviews and
they'll say that the device works on 'doze as-is, but in order to
enable the special features the card offers, you need to load the
(usually) 'doze-only drivers supplied.  In that case, I read it to
mean that the card will work as-is for 2 channel playback/recording
with any compatible USB audio OS (like the BSDen and such) with no
need for special drivers.

There's another card I've read about for which this is said to be
true, that I want to acquire and try it out, also with optical
outputs, to try my luck.  I'll try to remember to post an update.

It's theoretically possible that the cards which require drivers
in order to work, need a firmware load, after which they appear as
well-behaved USB audio devices, at least for the common 16-bit 2-
channel case.  No promises though.


barry bouwsma
(addresses in headers are not munged, honest)