[AG-TECH] Current soundcards in use with Alsa and rat?

[Rhys Hawkins]

Hi Eric,

I'm using just the onboard soundcard with rat/alsa and its working
fine. Its an Intel 82801DB-ICH4 (thats what rat reports). I'm using
Steve Smith's version of rat, as the one that ships with the gentoo
version of the AGtk had issues using the alsa driver.

The only other thing is that the mixer settings are difficult to
work out. For example, I had to set the microphone volume to 0
and capture to 50 to be able to talk and not hear my voice played
back to me which to me seemed counter-intuitive. I guess whats
missing is some documentation explaining what each of the mixer
settings actually do.

I've also got a Soundblaster Audigy going, but I actually prefer
to use the onboard card as it works and the mixer settings are
much simpler by comparison.

Cheers,
    Rhys


On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 15:46 -0600, Eric Olson wrote:
> Hi,
> For those of you on linux using Alsa with rat, can you tell me which sound 
> cards you're using successfully recently?
> 
> I've had problems with a couple cards so far, and would like to try one 
> that someone else is using, preferably with the Alsa driver instead of 
> the OSS compatibility driver, but anything that works (without the line-in 
> playback issues) would be great.  Someone mentioned that the Sound blaster 
> live should work -- are there any others I can try before buying one of 
> those to try it?
> 
> Here are my experiences so far with two cards:
> es1370 for the sound blaster pci 128 (model CT4700):
>   alsa driver fails on an assertion when running.
>       rat-4.2.22-media: simple.c:1412: snd_mixer_selem_has_playback_volume:
>       Assertion `elem' failed.
>   OSS driver plays correctly but rat often resets the line-input playback 
>       to on (i.e. when the volume is changed)
> intel8x0 integrated audio:
>   alsa driver sounds mechanical and seems to be playing back a little too 
>     slowly.
>   oss driver has the same line-input playback problem as the other card.
> 
> I'm testing with rat from both Doug's and Steve's recent packages and the 
> results are the same.  I've also built rat from UCL's cvs, but rat only 
> sees the OSS device and not the Alsa device, so I'm probably missing 
> something when building.
> 
> I wouldn't mind helping fix some of these issues, but in the meantime I 
> hope to find an already working soundcard for our production node so we 
> don't have to keep running a script to fix the line-input playback 
> setting.
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> Eric