ALSA SUXORS and OSS ROCKS (OPL3SA2)

anoland · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 May 2003 Posts: 86

I just spent several weeks getting the Yamaha OPL3SAx sound card on my laptop working. I've had it working just fine in the past using using the OSS drivers in the kernel, but I needed Windoze for school projects. When I decided to put Linux back on this baby I hadn't kept up with the development of the sound drivers. I also hadn't kept any notes on how I set up sound from before, so I was basically starting from scratch. I had read that ALSA is making it's way into 2.6 so I figured since I had to relearn anyway, may as well learn ALSA. Once I got it installed I found out that the OPL3SA2 chip is funky in the way that there are the standard mixer channels: PCM, synth, etc, and another separated mixer with the main vol, bass, treble and what I'm guessing is what Windoze calls the "Zoomed video" channel. (To make things worse, even though the card is ISA, isapnp cant see it.) For some reason ALSA couldn't control that secondary mixer. Needless to say that sound under ALSA sucked. It sounded like it was in a tin can. (Not just a tin can, but a tin can in a laptop with 3" speakers.) Even the line out to the stereo sounded bad. The one good thing I got out of this fiasco was the proper settings for the sound card. So I ripped out the ALSA drivers, recompiled my kernel to use OSS, edited lilo.conf[*], and viola, finally, properly working sound; for a laptop that is.

If anybody is having problems with the OPL3SA2 sound cards found in Gateway Solo 9100 or Toshiba Tecra 8000 or IBM ThinkPad 770 send me a message or reply here and I will try to help.

[*] I prefer non-modular kernels as much as possible, so its all compiled in and parameters are passed at boot.

The proper settings can be found in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/OPL3SA2
and
http://sdb.suselinux.hu/en/sdb/html/laptop_daten_toshiba_tecra-8000.html

Next step is to patch the kernel with the latest Trident FB...

Hasta.

YosemiteSammy · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 2

paulisdead · Guru Joined: 10 Apr 2002 Posts: 510 Location: Seattle, WA

The topic is really flame war material, there.

But I do agree, alsa NEVER works right for me. It always has to screw something up with games, only 1 speaker working, too fast audio playback, or permission errors when the permissions are definitely set correclty.

I've tried it on an SB Live and nforce2 onboard audio, and I really would like to have it working for 4.1 sound, but ALSA seems to hate me. I think I'll stick with good old OSS since it always works right off the bat, no problems, very little configuration involved outside the right kernel modules/options.

It does kind of annoy me that ALSA will be the standard for 2.6, since I've never had it working to my satisfaction, but hopefully it will work right by then.