[CLUE-Tech] sound card config

[Matt Gushee]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2002 at 08:41:11PM -0600, David Anselmi wrote:

> That means you have the wrong driver.  Making things work the way you 
> want after you get the right driver might not be trivial.  I've yet to 
> tweak KDE's artsd and the emu10k driver sufficiently.  The alsa sound 
> drivers seem much nicer to me, but aren't part of the 2.4 kernel yet.

After a long and unhappy relationship with the OSS modules (every time I
wanted to do something new with sound, I would have to reconfigure the
modules, the quality was always mediocre ... and lacking good
documentation, I had to spend several hours trial 'n' erroring to get
MIDI working), I finally broke down and installed ALSA last month. Wow!
What a difference! Now a single modprobe command correctly activates
everything, and my sound quality is somewhat better than I get with the
vendor-supplied Windows drivers, and enormously improved over the OSS
drivers*. So I'm now an ALSA advocate, I guess.

Although the ALSA drivers aren't included in the kernel, I found them
easy to compile. And the ALSA project has good sound-card-specific
documentation; they even have ready-made Debian configuration data,
which worked for me without modification.

* At least, that's true for my desktop machine. I'm also trying ALSA on
  my laptop, but haven't been able to get it working. Cheap-ass NeoMagic
  $@&*%#&)#!

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee at havenrock.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)