sound card woes

[Szilveszter Adam]

Hello,

On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 11:30:45AM -0400, Matt Gostick wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 17:04, Szilveszter Adam wrote:
> > What does 'cat /dev/sndstat' say?
> 
> # cat /dev/sndstat
> FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
> Installed devices:
> pcm0: <SB16 DSP 4.16 (ViBRA16X)> at io 0x220 irq 7 drq 0 bufsz 4096d (1p/1r/0v channels duplex default)

So it's a Vibra. It seems to be detected mostly ok.

> cat test.wav > /dev/dsp makes a sound...  but it isn't exactly what
> test.wav should sound like.

You mean the sound is distorted?

> > The issue is probably some resource conflict. Since you have an SB 16,
> > I'll have to ask: is it ISA? Or ISAPnP? Or PCI? PCI should "just work"
> > but if it is ISA, you will need some tweaking.
> 
> It is an ISA card... very old.  Should I try and dig up a PCI card, or
> is it going to fairly 'painless' tweaking?  Where should I start
> tweaking?

My previous assumption seems to be reinforced, it is probably a resource
conflict. If the card is ISAPnP (I think it is) you could try to extract
a correct configuration from it using the pnpinfo command. Do not be
very surprised if you will see many possible configs. (My old SB 64 AWE
card had at least 6 or something) Pick one that is marked "best" or
similar and check that the kernel uses that. You should also try and
avoid IRQ sharing for the slot that the card is in if possible. If the
card does not find the proper setting by itself, you may need to use
hints. See them in /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES, like this:

hints.sbc.0.at="isa"
hints.sbc.0.port="0x220"
hints.sbc.0.irq="5"
hints.sbc.0.drq="1"
hints.sbc.0.flags="0x15"

Please do not copy these simply, but find the settings that your card
supports and use those! 

If the card is not even ISAPnP, then you need its docs to find the real
config. Possibly there is also a DOS program to set them on the card or
jumpers. 

For your first question, yes, it should be easier to get a PCI card to
work (even an SB 16) and it will cause less problems in any case. ISA
cards can impact the system performance very badly.

Hope this helps somewhat.
-- 
Regards:

Szilveszter ADAM
Budapest
Hungary