Long-standing sound driver issues

Doug Lee dgl at dlee.org
Fri May 13 16:02:53 PDT 2005


I'll try this on FreeBSD-Questions first, then FreeBSD-Stable if I
don't get an answer here; not sure which is best.  I run
FreeBSD-Stable (4.10) with two sound cards:  a SoundBlaster AWE64 and
a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.  I use two because I can't get full duplex
with one.

I've always had several problems with sound on FreeBSD, and I'm
wondering if there's a solution or anything I can do to help promote
or create one.

1.  In several 4.x versions (can't remember which was the first),
sounds tend not to finish playing before they stop.  Tested with play
(from Sox) and wavplay ports.  rplay does finish sounds but doesn't
play as many formats.  The sound card used for this is a Turtle Beach
Santa Cruz.

2.  I can't record sound in stereo:  If I try, I get mono at best and
a mess at worst.  I record with a SoundBlaster AWE64.

3.  Monaural recording works but often requires me to edit the sound
file header (wav) to flip the high- and low-order bytes of the sample
rate.  Rec from Sox gets this part right though.

4.  If I use the sysctls for allowing virtual channels, problem 1 goes
away, but I get fuzzy-sounding results.

I never asked this before because I've always found ways around these
issues and figured it was relatively rare to use FreeBSD for sound
anyway, but it would really be nice to take advantage of some of the
capabilities of these cards under FreeBSD.

Thanks much for any help.  Please Cc replies.


-- 
Doug Lee           dgl at dlee.org        http://www.dlee.org
BART Group         doug at bartsite.com   http://www.bartsite.com
"Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then...find
the way." - Abraham Lincoln


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