Latest Debian unstable
Linux 2.6.8 (k7)
Soundblaster Live (emu10k1)
This has been bugging me for the past few days. I have a nice new 5.1 PC speaker system and a friend of a friend of a friend says that I should use ALSA to get the best out of it. I was currently using OSS (I think, I just modprobed emu10k1 awhile back and it worked fine since).
So I installed ALSA, rmmod'd emu10k1, blacklisted emu10k1 and emu10k1-gp in hotplug's blacklist (after an issue I googled for), ran alsaconf, selected my card, blah blah fine, no errors, took a look at the alsa mixer and made some changes to the obscene number of sliders that there seemed to be now.
Loaded up xmms, went to the configuration, selected alsa, selected my EMU10k1 card, selected Master for the sound control, queue'd up some Magnetic Fields, played around with the mixer to get a good bass, surrond, and center and all seemed well, except I couldn't change the volume. At all. I couldn't raise or lower it no matter what I did with the xmms slider. In the mixer I couldn't get results with any of the unGodly amount of sliders there either. I tried setting xmms's default chanel/slider/whatever thing to others and it still does nothing (although now I don't see why this would make a difference if Master doesn't work).
In other applications it's the same thing, either the sound is too high and the mixer doesn't do jack. In XMMS however I can use the "software" to control the volume but I'm still not comfortable with the fact that I can't control the levels themselves, not all applications have a "software" control and some apps like xine have a "software" volume control where anything above the first little "tick" mark is incredibly loud.
Now I have to resort to posting this thread because I'm all out of ideas. Googling seems to show a lot of similiar issues regarding things like oss modules (emu10k1) still being loaded but as shown in my lsmod output, it's not there:
Code:
Module Size Used by
ehci_hcd 31364 0
hci_usb 14016 0
ohci_hcd 21380 0
sg 38880 0
scsi_mod 124748 1 sg
lp 10920 0
snd_emu10k1 98312 8
smbfs 69560 2
nvidia 4821204 12
ipv6 262340 10
snd_rawmidi 25380 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_pcm_oss 54312 1
snd_mixer_oss 19904 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 97480 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 25540 1 snd_pcm
snd_seq_device 8264 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec 69572 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_page_alloc 11720 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_util_mem 4608 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep 9476 1 snd_emu10k1
snd 57380 24 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_
oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_seq_device,snd_ac97_codec,snd_util_mem,snd_hwdep
af_packet 22600 2
bluetooth 49284 1 hci_usb
ati_remote 13064 0
usbcore 118308 6 ehci_hcd,hci_usb,ohci_hcd,ati_remote
shpchp 100780 0
pciehp 97388 0
pci_hotplug 34352 2 shpchp,pciehp
sis_agp 8260 1
agpgart 34536 2 sis_agp
tsdev 7360 0
mousedev 10444 2
psmouse 20232 0
floppy 60304 0
analog 11872 0
gameport 4736 1 analog
parport_pc 35328 1
parport 41544 2 lp,parport_pc
pcspkr 3688 0
rtc 12728 0
evdev 9600 0
soundcore 10400 2 snd
ac97_codec 18700 0
sis900 20292 0
crc32 4352 1 sis900
dm_mod 59580 0
capability 4616 0
commoncap 7296 1 capability
ide_cd 42528 0
cdrom 40284 1 ide_cd
ext3 126760 5
jbd 61784 1 ext3
mbcache 9220 1 ext3
ide_generic 1472 0
sis5513 16776 1
ide_disk 19264 7
ide_core 138788 4 ide_cd,ide_generic,sis5513,ide_disk
unix 28596 89
fbcon 31940 71
font 8448 1 fbcon
vesafb 6688 1
cfbcopyarea 3776 1 vesafb
cfbimgblt 3072 1 vesafb
cfbfillrect 3712 1 vesafb
That sure is a load of modules for sound though, I don't quite understand why hci_usb would be using stuff for that, although I'm not sure of what that implies.
Anyway,
mainly I was told to switch to ALSA for my full multichannel sound for my 5.1 system, if there's another way to have 3d sound without using ALSA I'd sure as hell like to know, but in the mean time this is what I have.
Help is appreciated.
