Hello all,

I have been working on this problem for a while now and havent found a good solution, this seems to be one of the larger problems coming from windows for me...The problem is that the sound is crackly and sounds terrible in any 3d games. Playing MP3's or video seems to work fine.

I have 3 sound cards now, my X-Fi of course doesnt work at all

Onboard sound (Asus m2n32MB) which is a via chipset worked fine, but presents problems in any type of 3d games (Supertux and all others ive tried)to ry and fix this I have installed the latest ALSA drivers, and tried a number of things I found on forums...nothing worked, but some made it worse..
Given that the onboard sound seems to suck even in windows I opted to try a different soundcard...

SO I got a soundblaster audigy SE. I just finished installing this with the latest ALSA drivers, and was quite disapointed upon loading a game and finding it does the exact same thing as the onboard sound (which is now disabled in the bios)
For the Audigy card I added this to my .asoundrc file per the ALSA doc for this card:

pcm.ca0106 {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.ca0106 {
type hw
card 0
}
With or without the .asoundrc addition the sound is terrible in games. I have also tried setting the mixer volumes low, and muting what I dont need, this also had no effect.

I am at a loss of what to do next, please help me I want to play some of these very interesting linux games without the oh so annoying snap crackle and pop!

First your motherboard doesn't have a via chipset it's a nVidia nForce 590 SLI chipset. Second, tell us what are your game, because in quake 4 and doom 3, there are arguments for correct this. eg. "quake4 +set s_driver oss +set s_numberOfSpeakers 2" did you check your oss system??

my mistake on the chipset part, ive been reading way too much stuff any my mind is lost. Thanks for pointing it out

as for the games ive only tried a few as I simply cant enjoy playing them with the sound as it is:
Tuxracer and supertux
warzone 2100
astromenace

havent tried doom3 yet...

and being new to linux in general I dont know what to check with OSS to be honest... ;P

Try to run your game in a terminal and attach all details. You may have errors due to your sound system, this will help to resolve your problem.

so after reading the post to check OSS I tried to get OSS running and ended up just installing it per the OSS site. Now my system seems to lock up (mouse moves but nothing works) frequently. Every time I try to run a game for example, or even closing konsole locks everything up. so much fun... ;P

immediately after i got OSS working I ran a game and the sound was perfect...however shortly after the system locked up and now games wont load at all. I removed OSS and now the games once again work, with no sound of course.

ok a ran a few games and none gave errors, except warzone which said:
FATAL: fglX11FreeBuffer: firegl_FreeBuffer() failed!


I ran all of these same games in OSS and they worked fine, however since it only supports one program at a time I had problems with that...

So if anyone knows how to either fix ALSA or make OSS work with multiple programs (without buying it) that would be great.

Again I greatly appreciate the help