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Got a Sound Blaster? Hate ALSA? I have the solution...


DOlson
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OK, ALSA or not - is there ever going to be some NORMAL GUI mixer/configurator app for SB Live! ? You know, like a Creative one for Windows? Choose headphones/2 speakers/4 speakers with two clicks, choose the EAX effects with 2 clicks, place this source here and this source there? And not just letting me experiment with the pure EMU10K1 registers?

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OK, ALSA or not - is there ever going to be some NORMAL GUI mixer/configurator app for SB Live! ? You know, like a Creative one for Windows? Choose headphones/2 speakers/4 speakers with two clicks, choose the EAX effects with 2 clicks, place this source here and this source there? And not just letting me experiment with the pure EMU10K1 registers?

 

Since I don't work at Creative, I wouldn't know.

 

How about you email/phone/fax them and see for yourself...

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Hah! Good luck in petitioting Creative to do anything with linux. You stand a much better chance asking some other programmers (the ALSA project for example) to create that gui instead of Creative.

 

Yeah I am bitter to Creative. This is the company that kills Aureal even though it makes a better soundcard than Creative.

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Hah! Good luck in petitioting Creative to do anything with linux. You stand a much better chance asking some other programmers (the ALSA project for example) to create that gui instead of Creative.  

 

Yeah I am bitter to Creative. This is the company that kills Aureal even though it makes a better soundcard than Creative.

 

Obviously Aureal didn't stand a chance, otherwise they would have been number one.

 

Lemme ask you, do you hate NVidia too?

 

Creative is one of the few companies that actually supported Linux at all. Hence their open-sourced drive...

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The way Creative wins and Aureal lose is because Creative is suing Aureal. Aureal wins, but went bankrupt from paying lawyers' fee. Creative then buy aureal and basically shuts them down. If that is not a dirty way to put people out of business, I don't know what is.

 

Open sourced drivers from Creative? Yeah right, for a while the only way to get sound from newer creative sound cards is to get hacked drivers from either OSS or ALSA. At one time, the web page (opensource.creative.com) didn't get updated for ages. It wasn't until the hackers got the sound drivers working when creative people basically just "stole" their works and just host them up. Heck. Creative doesn't even have PCI soundcards until they buy Ensoniq and rebrand their cards under soundblaster name while other companies start creating pci soundcards. It is a case where marketting and size beats technical edge this time.

 

I actually like NVidia. It is one of the few companies that comes from small fry to big giants. I still remember pre TNT Nvidia cards (Riva?) The one that bundles Panzer Dragoon. NVidia got big mainly because of good technology and good price (the fact that the king of the hill at the time, 3DFX makes blunders after blunders also help a lot)

 

Sorry to be ranting about this. I just hate Creative Labs. It is the microsoft of the soundcards in my book.

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Hah! Good luck in petitioting Creative to do anything with linux. You stand a much better chance asking some other programmers (the ALSA project for example) to create that gui instead of Creative.  

I didn't imply Creative make it. Exactly the other way around. Isn't there anyone interested in such mixer in the whole community? GAMIX is excellent mixer, for example, but it shows rather PURE REGISTERS and lets you experiment with them. Why not make a normal GUI like the GUI of Creative? TASKS instead of REGISTERS? "Output to headphones", "Output to front speakers", "Output to front and rear speakers", "Output to 5.1 if the card supports it"? AFAIU, all the registers are known, there should not be a big problem to make some normal GUI.

BTW, there used to be some GUI like that - for ALSA 0.5. It doesn't compile with ALSA 0.9.

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The way Creative wins and Aureal lose is because Creative is suing Aureal. Aureal wins, but went bankrupt from paying lawyers' fee. Creative then buy aureal and basically shuts them down. If that is not a dirty way to put people out of business, I don't know what is.

 

Open sourced drivers from Creative? Yeah right, for a while the only way to get sound from newer creative sound cards is to get hacked drivers from either OSS or ALSA. At one time, the web page (opensource.creative.com) didn't get updated for ages. It wasn't until the hackers got the sound drivers working when creative people basically just "stole" their works and just host them up. Heck. Creative doesn't even have PCI soundcards until they buy Ensoniq and rebrand their cards under soundblaster name while other companies start creating pci soundcards. It is a case where marketting and size beats technical edge this time.

 

I actually like NVidia. It is one of the few companies that comes from small fry to big giants. I still remember pre TNT Nvidia cards (Riva?) The one that bundles Panzer Dragoon. NVidia got big mainly because of good technology and good price (the fact that the king of the hill at the time, 3DFX makes blunders after blunders also help a lot)

 

Sorry to be ranting about this. I just hate Creative Labs. It is the microsoft of the soundcards in my book.

 

Creative have actually been helping the Linux situation.

 

If you know of any other sound card that sounds as good and supports 4 speakers and doesn't suck ass in Linux, you let me know, and I'll see about switching.

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I think Creative Sound Cards are okay. But you might be right she's getting arrogant for such a marketing tactic and share.

 

Still the thing is I think the price of OEM SB Live! is really hard to beat (around US$20-30), with soundfont support and the full utility installation CD (for Windows) no other soundcards can manage to squeeze so many functions and tools with such a low price point. Of course Linux support is another question.

 

To me ALSA 0.9rc3 has been doing fine. Just check out the latest ALSA Soundcard database and click on the "Install" link right besides the soundcard model you have, you should be able to locate the install info and get thru the complete installation without much trouble, just like I did with my SB Live.

 

ALSA Soundcard PHP database

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/

 

Also to support MIDI playback you need awesfx package, which is bundled with Mandrake Linux 8.2: use software manager to locate the RPM by alphabetical list and install the package.

 

Once that is installed, copy the soundfont *.sf2 files from the SB Live! Installation CD to your harddrive and load your favorite soundfont with "sfxload abc.sf2", where "abc.sf2" is the soundfont file you have copied/downloaded in your harddrive. Use "playmidi -a" or "drvmidi" to play your favorite MIDI music and enjoy! (I am trying to get XMMS playmidi/drvmidi plugin working, hopefully it will be done soon :) ).

 

Note: you have to remove/rename the line for the OSS/Free driver for SB Live in the modules.conf to stop the OSS module working before installing the ALSA driver yourself.

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The point of my tutorial is to get away from ALSA because it sounds like a tin can......

 

I'm not going to move to ALSA until it sounds decent and my games play the sounds as they happen, not a second or two later. Call me picky, but that's how it worked in Windows, and I expect nothing less in Linux.

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I see, but excellent MIDI playback is a must to me. So I will go for ALSA at the moment. Maybe I am not that sensitive to delay as I found not much problem when playing UT2003 Demo on Linux with ALSA as the sound driver (I did notice occasional glitch especially when other programs such as mozilla.org are loaded in the background). You are right, ALSA still needs to be worked on. Perhaps native MIDI playback is a problem still needs to be addressed.

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Guest namaste1

ALSA sounds like tin can?

I'm using SBlive with XMMS and ALSA plugin and I think the sound is quite OK.

 

I have decent headphones and I did not notice any major difference between ALSA and OSS....

 

Have you done some blind listening tests to verify that ALSA sucks ;)

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No, it's called being a musician and knowing how music should sound. It's called not using shit speakers, but quality stuff such as Cambridge SoundWorks or Klipsch ProMedia. It's called, I LIKE BASS AND TREBLE CONTROLS. It's called I don't have wax in my ears.

 

Whatever you call it, OSS sounds better.

 

But if MIDI is a priority over PCM, then I guess ALSA is the way to go.

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