Hi. I installed Red Hat 9.0 (kernel 2.4.20-8) about a week ago, and I've spent the time since then struggling with this sound card. My computer:
Athlon XP 1800+
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP motherboard
Creative Audigy Platinum eX sound card
Cambridge Soundworks Megaworks 510D speakers
I use the speakers/sound card in digital mode, so it's just one minijack on the card to one minijack on the subwoofer.
That's all that I can think of as being relevant computer info, but I could be wrong. Anyway, back to the problem.
During the install, it was trying to auto-detect my sound card and asked if I could hear this sound. I couldn't, until I realized I had headphones plugged in. I checked the headphones, and the sound was fine. So I went on my merry way. Later, I removed my headphones and tried to listen for sound...but I heard nothing. Relevant info at this point:
Red Hat's sound card auto-detect identified my card as an "audigy," and that's the name on any of the modules that were loaded.
Okay, so it occurs to me that it's because it probably doesn't have digital output enabled. Instead of dealing with the software aspect of that, I decided I'd take it easy on myself and just connect my speakers to my sound card via analog instead. I was greeted with nothing but static. Lots, and lots of annoying static. If I unload the sound module, then the static goes away. But as soon as I load it, or something sound-related loads it, it's right back again. I decided that this may be a problem with the analog setup, so I went back to digital. I downloaded the emu10k1 v0.20a drivers, installed them, and then used "emu-config -d" to switch over to digital output. It works, but once again, the static returns.
Funny enough, "emu-config -d" seems to apply to both the standard RH "audigy" drivers and the emu101k drivers. They both act pretty much the same.
Shortly after I did that last night, I was trying to play a CD to see if I could at least hear some audio coming through the static. Then the most peculiar thing happened. I opened up Kmix to tweak some volume levels, and suddenly the static stopped. Everything was suddenly working perfectly. I could hear the CD, and everything was fine. In disbelief, I rebooted my computer to see if the problem was permanently fixed. I had to switch back to digital mode again on the command line, but beyond that, it worked. No static at any point.
So today, I rebooted again, played around in Windows a bit, came back to Linux, and found that the static has returned. And this time, opening Kmix or any other program doesn't seem to fix it. Now, here are some interesting things:
There's a channel in Kmix called "dig1." If I mute this channel, the static stops. If I try to play a CD, I still can't hear anything...BUT other sound works. For example, if I go to the KDE Control Center, go to "Sound System," and click the "Test Sound" button, it works perfectly. I hear the test sound crystal clear. In the Sound System settings, my "Sound I/O" is set to "Autodetect." And likewise, Gaim is set to use "Automatic" to provide sound when I receive an instant message, and I hear those sounds fine. So I guess the basic question is this:
What is dig1, and why is it completely filled with static? Apparently there's some sort of software issue, because it did work without static for some time last night. And why does muting it affect my CD playing, but not sounds generated by other programs?
And oops, I'm not typing this from the right computer to copy and paste some commands and their output, so I'll follow this posting up with that information.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
