[CLUE-Tech] SB Live! Mixer Tweaking

[Timothy Klein]

I hate to reply to my own message, but since this stuff is recorded for 
posterity...

I may have found the problem, after all these many months:  artsd.

As it turns out, a SoundBlaster Live can do hardware mixing.  So can ALSA.  I 
just played an MP3 thought Kaffeine (xine frontend), an MP3 XMMS, and had 
regular system notification sounds running from KDE, all concurrently.  No 
distortion was heard.  I won't know for sure until tomorrow, as my wife is 
asleep and I can't turn the volume very high.  But distortion was audible at 
low volume before I turned artsd off.  It seems to be gone now.  Since I 
killed artsd, the mixer channels have not mysteriously changed, either.

The mixer is still very complicated and easy to hose up (it seems that many of 
these mixer channels are not well understood by the open source community), 
but all that complexity may not have been the problem.  Of course, I have 
thought that I had this fixed before, so I shouldn't get too excited...

Still interested in others experience with this card.  And now artsd.   It had 
never occurred to me to get rid of it -- I was assuming that sound would stop 
functioning in KDE without it.  So far, most stuff works fine without it 
(except Juk, which is a bummer, I really like that one).  Artsd has never 
given me anything but trouble anyway.  High CPU usage and drop-outs, and now 
this distortion, it seems.  But I'll be happy if I can run my sound system 
without it.

Man, I am sitting here hacking sound problems on my machine on Saturday night.  
Boy, I need a life.

Tim
-- 
== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net
== Vanity Page: http://tinyurl.com/vkhp
== ----------------------------------------
== Hello_World.c: 17 Errors, 31 Warnings...