| /proc/sound, /dev/sndstat |
| ------------------------- |
| |
| /proc/sound and /dev/sndstat is not supported by the |
| driver. To find out whether the driver succeeded loading, |
| check the kernel log (dmesg). |
| |
| |
| ALaw/uLaw sample formats |
| ------------------------ |
| |
| This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats. |
| ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device |
| using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is |
| that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding |
| conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly |
| code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver. |
| And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-) |
| and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway. |
| In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows: |
| |
| cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp |
| |
| does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from |
| Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (available from the URL |
| below) to play many different audio file formats. |
| The script automatically determines the audio format |
| and does do audio conversions if necessary. |
| http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html |
| |
| |
| Blocking vs. nonblocking IO |
| --------------------------- |
| |
| Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag |
| not only during open, but also during read and write. |
| This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more |
| regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch |
| is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html. |
| (Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free). |
| |
| |
| MIDI UART |
| --------- |
| |
| The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with |
| no ioctl's supported. |
| |
| |
| MIDI synthesizer |
| ---------------- |
| |
| The card both has an OPL compatible FM synthesizer as well as |
| a wavetable synthesizer. |
| |
| I haven't managed so far to get the OPL synth running. |
| |
| Using the wavetable synthesizer requires allocating |
| 1-4MB of physically contiguous memory, which isn't possible |
| currently on Linux without ugly hacks like the bigphysarea |
| patch. Therefore, the driver doesn't support wavetable |
| synthesis. |
| |
| |
| No support from S3 |
| ------------------ |
| |
| I do not get any support from S3. Therefore, the driver |
| still has many problems. For example, although the manual |
| states that the chip should be able to access the sample |
| buffer anywhere in 32bit address space, I haven't managed to |
| get it working with buffers above 16M. Therefore, the card |
| has the same disadvantages as ISA soundcards. |
| |
| Given that the card is also very noisy, and if you haven't |
| already bought it, you should strongly opt for one of the |
| comparatively priced Ensoniq products. |
| |
| |
| Thomas Sailer |
| t.sailer@alumni.ethz.ch |
