Sounds problems on a SB AWE64 card
 

I have a SB AWE 64 pci card. On windows it works fine.
But on linux i first tryed using it with ess... then i merged to OSS to see if the problem got solved.. but i still have the problem...
The problem is that i can hear music, etc.. sound works but sound quality is very poor! i constantly hear cracks, speaker "bad" sounds, etc... this happens with any app that uses sound(xmms, mpg123,etc)
I have debian woody 3.
It's not speaker probs cause on windows it works fine.


Thanks in advance
:newbie:

Now I wonder if this is the same problem I have?
I am running Mandrake 9
on an AMD machine (Duron750)
es1371 card (Soundblaster PCI128)
and I have tried both ALSA and OSS options and I get something I havent heard since win95 and that excellent game Theme Park.
when playing sounds, I sometimes get a tapping sound , like someone rapidly tapping a microphone, while at the same time it distorts the sound.

This happens constantly on DVD playback using OGLE
it happens with a lot of system activity when playing music files.

I wondered if tweaking DMA's for the DVD drive and Hard disks would help, but havent had time to start playing with those things yet.
I would be grateful if anyone could steer me in the right direction on this, as I am not completely sure.

Many thanks
BOFH1971

You probably sorted this out long ago... but just in case...

I had the same problem as you, when first getting my sound card going under KDE. Everthing worked fine when running X under root (not really recommended!), but when I logged in as myself under KDE, I got an aRTs warning or error saying something like:

"Cannot run soundserver with realtime priority... etc. ... run arts(whatever) as root..."

and the sound was horrible!

You might like to run the Sound System - KDE Control Module to check your settings...

K > Configuration > KDE > Sound > Sound System (via my menu when running KDE)

Under the aRTs tab I use:

- Start aRts soundsverer on KDE startup - ON
- Run soundserver with realtime priority - ON
- Autosuspend if idle for 60 sec
- Display messages using artsmessage
- Message display: Errors

... everything else not used.

CHANGE THIS LAST ONE ON YOUR SYSTEM TO:

- Message display: Information

... or perhaps "debug" (just for now)

(I can hear the default KDE startup sound when I click the Test Sound button)

Under the Sound I/O tab I use:

- Sound I/O method: Autodetect
- Use custom sampling rate: 48000
- Sound quality: Autodetect
- Audio Buffer Size (response time): 128 milliseconds (6 fragments with 4096 bytes)

Under the MIDI tab I see:

- Sound Blaster 16 - External Midi Port
- AWE Midi Emu - External Midi Port
- AWE32-0.4.4 (RAM12288k)

(with the last one of these selected which uses the 8 MB General MIDI sample loaded on my card for playing MIDI stuff)

I am not certain what I did to fix things, but I think that there were two main things:

1. Running a terminal as root, I ran the command:

chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/sequencer2 /dev/midi /dev/seq

Note: I did not have a /dev/midi or /dev/seq by default but made a symbolic link from them to /dev/sequencer, as some programs seem to insist on using one of these device names (and I do not always know how to correct this!). I also did a chown on the links:

chown richard:audio /dev/midi /dev/seq

2. Running the arts(whatever?) program referred to by the artsmessage as root, but I cannot rember exactly what it was!

My stuff under /dev looks like this...

[root@richlnx bin]# ls -l /dev/mixer
crw------- 1 richard audio 14, 0 Jul 4 15:23 /dev/mixer
[root@richlnx bin]# ls -l /dev/midi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 richard audio 14 Aug 4 22:40 /dev/midi -> /dev/sequencer
[root@richlnx bin]# ls -l /dev/seq*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 richard audio 14 Aug 5 10:17 /dev/seq -> /dev/sequencer
crw-rw-rw- 1 richard audio 14, 1 Jul 4 15:23 /dev/sequencer
crw------- 1 richard audio 14, 8 Jul 4 15:23 /dev/sequencer2

Not sure that is is all "kosher", but it seemed to work for me :-)

Hope that it helps?

Best Regards...

Thanks a lot!!!!
This info was very useful for me

Thanks.

Glad that what I wrote was of help to you. Please let us know if you manage to get you sound working properly now.

I have been experimenting with quite a few sound programs, especially for MIDI, and have been struggling for some days to try and get Rosegarden-4 (beta) to work... so far without success :-(

see http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/

It looks that it will be a great MIDI application... if only I could get it to connect to my AWE64 Gold to actually play something (!)

... perhaps you (or someone else with an AWE64 card reading this) would like to try it and let us know if they have more success than me?

Regards...

Richard.