why does motherboard sound suck?

[Jason Stewart]

Ross Lippert wrote:
> I just got new hardware and I installed 5.1 on it (not tht it matters,
> because what I am asking about is observed in 4.X).
> 
> Why is it that so-called the built-in soundcard that my motherboard
> comes with does work with everything?
> 
> By that I mean that I can play the usual multimedia stuff without
> a hitch, xmms, mpg123, mplayer, artsd all work just fine.  The card comes
> up as some AC97 under pcm.
> 
> But if I try to use some of the more esoteric ports like stella
> or festival, I get no sound.  With festival I can do a trick like
> filter the output through the command
>  'sox -r 1600 -t sw $FILE -r 4800 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp'
> because it provides hooks to do this, but I don't see why I have to
> (btw the port can't build festival on 5.1 yet, but you can on 4.X,
> and I am working on patching it for 5.1).
> 
> stella, the atari emulator, has the same trouble.
> 
> I have observed this on another motherboard with a so-called built-in
> soundcard as well (mpg123 plays, sox plays, stella doesn't) about
> 2 years ago (problem solved by buying a SB16 for it).
> 
> The solution has, in the past, been to just keep using an old
> soundblaster card and disabling motherboard sound in favor of the
> SB card.  But I am tired of using up a PCI slot just to keep a
> handful of my favorite ports running.
> 
> I've looked at the sources to festival (and a bit at stella, though
> I do not understand them as well), specicially the voxware.cc file
> which seems to talk directly to /dev/dsp.  It doesn't seem to do
> anything fancy, just sets the same rate and copies an array of
> sound bytes to a FILE*.
> 
> So I ask, where does the fault lie?  Is stella/festival soundblaster centric,
> and just won't talk to AC97 cards?  Is my motherboard AC97 deficient?
> And why are motherboard cards deficient?  Should I focus my energy
> on my hardware (replace card)?  My OS (debug AC97 driver or find a sox-like
> workaround for stella)? Or my apps (debug stella and festival)?
> 
> I'll bet there are other ports that I don't use that have this same
> trouble.
> 
> -r
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I don't think the problem lies in your built in sound card.

Maybe arts is giving you trouble. Read common problems under 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/sound-setup.html

See also the arts FAQ:
http://www.arts-project.org/doc/mcop-doc/artsd-faq.html


Jason