Finally got RC3 of Alsa to build and still the same

Kerry Hoath kerry at gotss.net
Sat Oct 19 06:40:23 EDT 2002


The last version of alsa I have messed with is 0.5.12
under the 2.2.x kernel.
I have had thousands of hours of flawless operation from it;
and yes that includes ISA cards.
Have you considered actually emailing the alsa development list or filing a bug report?
Surely bugs do exist in t  he drivers; but if nobody reports them they can
not be fixed.
I do not use ISA cards for sound anymore;
due to the need to allocate isa bounce buffers for dma which can fail if ram
is fragmented.
You can only do dma to t he first 16 megs of memory on the ISA bus.
I have also found creative cards of the AWE32/64 vintage
tend to cut off everything over 18khz or so wh en sampling at 44100.
Sure I have about 5 here; but they all gather dust since new pci cards
can play multiple streams and are ar more cpu efficient than their
ISA cousins.
PCI can also dma to anywhere in the address space so no bounce buffers
in low memory.
I hope your alsa setup works for  you; if not; feel free to buy
the comercial sound drivers t hat work well for many people;
or use the drivers in the kernel.
If you are accidently using 2 8-bit dma channels i.e. dma<4
then you will experience strife.
The AWE 64 needs an 8 and 16-bit channel usually
1 and 5 respectively.
Alsa does work for a lot of people including Alan cox and other
speakup users; so i'd say something is amiss with your
setup hardware or configuration.
Do you have any other busmastering ISA cards in t he system?

Regards, Kerry.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 07:46:20PM -0500, Adam Myrow wrote:
> I got RC3 of Alsa to build by specifying that it only build support for my
> sound card.  I did a "./configure --with-sequencer=yes --with-cards=sbawe"
> and that left out the offending code.  However, it acts exactly like Beta
> 12 did.  It still slows the sound down to a crawl randomly, and now I've
> figured out that it also randomly makes recordings into noise.  I am
> absolutely disgusted with Alsa.  I don't think it's ready for production
> and including it in the kernel is a very bad idea IMHO if this is its
> current state.  Given that it has had several years to develop, I would
> expect something usable by now, but as far as I'm concerned, it is
> completely useless.  I don't know how you guys have ever gotten any good
> out of the thing.  Maybe it's just broken with the AWE64.
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 

-- 
Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au





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