VIA 82XX and Creative Live!

bjchamb · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 17

I currently have just finished getting VIA 82XX to work with ALSA and Artsd and all that jazz, but I was wondering, how much would it improve the sound quality and the overall performance of the sounds if I were to switch to an old Sound Blaster Live! that I have sitting around? I know the Live! is rather old, but if I remember right it should still be better than the onboard audio of a motherboard. What changes would I have to make to the system in order to get this to work? I'm using kernel 2.4.22 gentoo sources.

Thanks for the advice.

dsd · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 7:16 pm Post subject:

sound blaster live's have the advantage of *hardware mixing*. that means, that if two programs try to play sound at the same time, then the sound card will do all the hard work of mixing the two sounds so that both can be played back at the same time.

you may argue that you are able to play two sounds simultaneously right now, but thats because of artsd. artsd is using *software* mixing to mix the sounds, which uses up lots of CPU time.

if you stick your SB live in, you will be able to get rid of artsd, freeing up system resources, plus you will get the bonus of decent hardware mixing. plus, the SB Live's are good cards, your onboard chip is likely to rely on the CPU for lots of tasks, whereas the live! has its own hardware...
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bjchamb · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 17

So after I put in the card, I should recompile alsa and unmerge arts. Then just switch the programs I have over to using alsa for output instead of arts? Is this correct?

dsd · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 7:20 pm Post subject:

yep

after unmerging arts, you may also have to re-merge programs that were compiled with arts support
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jmoeller · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 7:46 pm Post subject:

You mean like kde-libs??

Don't be so hasty to unmerge stuff. You can just turn off arts. I have mine turned off.
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bjchamb · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 17

You can't unmerge just arts? If you can't I guess I'll just disable it... where exactly do you turn it off? The control panel? Then go to every program configured to use arts and change it to straight alsa?

jmoeller · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2004 9:03 pm Post subject:

In KDE, you can go to the Sound & Multimedia -> Sound system section and just disable the arts server on startup. Then, for example, with xine, just use: