LinuxQuestions.org - sound card (x-fi) stutters, additional questions about linux sound architecture

After going through the painful 2-day process of installing drivers for my Creative X-Fi card, I was pleased to see the modules were loaded and everything was properly being detected. That was all good, until I heard the horrible excuse for sound that the card came up with. It is a stuttering sound, repeating the first 1/3 second of music for about 20 seconds then the next 1/3, etc.

Is this a problem with the driver? Or is there some other configuration I need to do with linux? Is there another layer to mess with between the driver and linux? Do I need to do anything with ALSA, or is that an alternative to the creative driver itself? You'll have to excuse my lack of understanding about the sound architecture in linux.

I recompiled the 2.6.22.14 kernel configured with SLAB on Fedora 8, 64bit. I can't upgrade the kernel because the creative driver is such a pile it only works under the most restricted set of cases.

Here is the output of lspci:

Code:

00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)

00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a2)

00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 1 (rev a2)

00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 5 (rev a2)

00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 4 (rev a2)

00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)

00:00.6 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 3 (rev a2)

00:00.7 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 2 (rev a2)

00:02.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)

00:03.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)

00:04.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge (rev a1)

00:09.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a4)

00:0a.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev a4)

00:0a.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2)

00:0b.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2)

00:0b.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a4)

00:0f.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f3)

00:10.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)

00:11.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)

00:12.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev a2)

00:13.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev a3)

00:16.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)

00:17.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)

00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration

00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map

00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller

00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control

01:00.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller (rev 01)

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce 7600 GS] (rev a1)

04:07.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)

04:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB X-Fi

04:0b.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

Any help is appreciated, even if it means pointing me in some direction.
Thanks
-Eric