SB Live, ALSA or OSS?

bakgwailo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 May 2002 Posts: 113

When I first started using Gentoo, I used ALSA for my SB Live. I could never get the rear channels to work, so at the next reinstall (had HD), I went with the sourceforge emu10k1 driver, which I can get all of the speakers working with on my 5.1 setup. How ever, the sourceforge emu10k1 is not compatable with the dev kernel, which I would like to try out. And I am planning on a reinstall when 1.4 comes out, so how is ALSA fairing now? I remember the sound quality was better, too. Anyone get all speakers to work with it, or am I better off staying with OSS? Thanks !
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rojaro · l33t Joined: 06 May 2002 Posts: 732

the driver at sourceforge is actually the same driver which is included in the kernel. i am using 2.5.58 right now with the included driver which works like a charm. but i didnt install the media-sound/emu10k1 package as this will bring the (older) driver (it seems) from sourceforge which also does not work for me. so i just downloaded the emu-tools sources and compiled them by hand and placed them under /usr/local ...
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jufoa · Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2003 8:08 am Post subject:

yeah.. OSS driver is the way to go with sb live cards.

get it from www.sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1 or just emerge it. sblive 5.1 is fully supported. digital out and 5.1 analog channels.

bakgwailo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 May 2002 Posts: 113

Just finished installing the newest dev kernel, OSS seems to work nicely with it. I guess its 2 to 0 for OSS instead of ALSA? ^_^
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TGL · Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2003 1:14 pm Post subject:

I've not tried the OSS driver, but the Alsa one is also working flawlessly. And the midi sequencer support is good, including soundfonts loading, recording, etc.

bakgwailo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 May 2002 Posts: 113

Which sound blaster do you have? I have an OEM SB Live 5.1
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thinair · Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 12:32 am Post subject:

You should use emu10k1 package... it allow you to have more control about your sblive... and you can configure it more... with the /etc/emu10k1 file...

idl · Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 1:10 am Post subject:

another vote for OSS here!
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Sastraxi · Apprentice Joined: 25 Feb 2003 Posts: 258

I've never had anything but trouble with OSS, I use ALSA because of one major problem: In Windows and Linux/OSS, the sound "borks" every couple of minutes, playing back the last sample from anywhere from 1/2 a second to 10 seconds. With Linux/ALSA (snd-emu10k1), this behaviour does not happen...

Sastraxi · Apprentice Joined: 25 Feb 2003 Posts: 258

And Creative has been less than helpful with it =(

darktux · Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2003 12:56 pm Post subject:

ALSA is becoming the standard. OSS is starting to fade away. You can already see this on the 2.5 versions of the Kernel.
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waverider202 · Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2003 9:41 pm Post subject: oss

but alsa just comes with a whole lot of problems. Alsa never seems to work right. I don't think OSS will ever die, alsa can never beat out OSS
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AkiAki007 · Posted: Fri Mar 07, 2003 10:04 pm Post subject:

The reason that ALSA never works is because someone configured something wrong. Sorry, that's what it is. ALSA works rather well if it's all set up right. I got it to work on the worst of sound cards, and my room-mate has an SB Live! which doesn't have recent Windows drivers (not the one he has), and he couldn't get it to work 100% in windows, but had 0 problems in Debian using ALSA.

ALSA works, it's just a matter of reading the proper documentation on it. I find that often people don't read the right docs or often skip 1 line (usually the most important one), or whatever. ALSA works great, if you can install it properly

Tom Brown · Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2003 6:59 am Post subject:

I've had nothing but trouble installing the ALSA-moud drivers. They can't seem to find the headers they need to make them happy with my openmosix-sources kernel.

When I did have them installed, I found the sound would break up but it didn't with the OSS drivers. Backing down the volume helped but it didn't solve the problem. Their is either a bug or I had a configuration problem with the intel8x0 ALSA-moud driver.

-- Tom

waverider202 · Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2003 2:25 pm Post subject: alsa

its not that I misconfigured alsa, its that alsa just acts wierd. I had issues where the alsa modules didn't want to load. All it took was a reboot and they would load again, it was really a toss up. When they were working, I found that the only sound I could get was out the fronts. That may have been me misconfiguring, but other issues just kept popping up. With oss, you modprobe emu10k1, and its fully functional.
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