Problems with sound. AC'97.

TazG · Guru Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 320 Location: Canada

I'm having problems with sound. MP3s constantly skip so I can hardly hear them, MIDI won't play, OGGs sound terrible (like I'm playing them with bad speakers...), and there is no sound in Shockwave Flash. WAVs seem OK though.
In Knoppix sound works better - MP3s and OGGs work. I noticed when Knoppix is starting up it says it's using i810_audio, but Gentoo says snd-intel8x0. How do you change that?

Also what do I need to be able to play WMA and WMV?

Raoul_Duke · Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 3:33 pm Post subject:

Mplayer will play the windows media video and audio.

As for the sound problem, are you using alsa?
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HydroSan · Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 3:52 pm Post subject:

Man, you sound like your having the same problems I had with my crappy onboard VIA AC'97 audio card. Is this onboard audio? If it is, I suggest getting some PCI solution like a SoundBlaster Audigy/2 or a LIVE!.
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TazG · Guru Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 320 Location: Canada

Yes I'm using ALSA, the builtin one in kernel 2.6.
The sound is onboard, except it's Intel not VIA... but why would I need a new one - It sounds really nice in Knoppix (and Windows).

Gestalt73 · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2004 Posts: 29

After about a day of dinking around I've got acceptable results using AC97 and alsa in KDE. Not sure if gnome uses arts or esd or something else.

What it boils down to is that the current driver can only play one sound at a time, and via won't release the chip specs so the developers can't provide the full feature set of the windows driver version. So you've got to go through all of your sound proggies and make sure they all use alsa or arts and not try to access the sound devices directly.

Make sure you've got alsa and arts in your USE flags:

TazG · Guru Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 320 Location: Canada

OK alsa was in USE but arts wasn't so I added and then emerge kdebase and kdemultimedia and went through the alsa setup and there is absolutely no difference!

In /etc/modules.d/alsa I put i810_audio but it still says intel-8x0 when it's starting up...

TazG · Guru Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 320 Location: Canada

Hi.

I just bought the Soundblaster and so far it seems to have fixed the problem, but there is still something wrong. In the volume control Master has no effect. I can hear sound even if "Master" is muted. "Headphone" controls the headphone fine... but when I use my speakers it's really quiet. "Headphone" still controls the speakers, and none of the other things have any effect. What's wrong here?