[wellylug] Linux sound -- opinions needed ... please.

[Jonathan Harker]

On Thursday 27 Feb 2003 3:00 am, Nigel Walters wrote:
> I am interested in playing any (& every) game with sound. I also record
> my old lp's to CD-R (and at the moment get a poor quality result).

I have experience in this also. The problem is usually down to hardware. First 
of all, I trust you are passing your turntable output through a decent RIAA 
preamp circuit first! :-) I have custody of my brother's Luxman turntable and 
a lovely old valve amplifier with a great phono circuit.

Sound cards (even the flashier Creative and Turtle Beach offerings) are 
usually designed for output, and input is always a secondary consideration. 
Most cheaper soundcards work in such a way that you're only really getting 
about 12 bit resolution. The AD is usually cheap & nasty, with crap dithering 
algorithms, if any. To get a decent result that preserves all the HF detail 
and spaciousness from the vinyl, it really needs to be captured at 24/96 or 
24/192, and dithered down to 16/44 with a professional algorithm at the last 
possible stage in order to get anything like a CD quality result, which is 
why I've gone off it - decent 24 audio cards are upwards of $1000!

> My main problem at the moment is that when I play a game with sound (but
> not an arts client) there is a point around the time arts unloads itself
> that a crash is caused freezing the whole machine. Either side of this
> period the game will run either with or without sound depending on the
> state of arts.

What kind of sound card do you have, also what distro are you running, 
versions of Gnome, KDE, etc. Sounds suspiciously like .so hell. It would be 
interesting to see if your problems disappear with alsa. Alsa is OSS 
compatible, and generally A Good Thing(TM). There's tons of kernel projects 
out there, and you could probably find one that's basically "the kernel for 
$YOUR_DISTRO with alsa".

> I have not heard of jack before this looks good for its purpose.. but
> how good is it at handling non-jack clients (is there a jacckdsp ? etc)
> and other more general use.

Jack is really only for professional audio editing, as it is built with 
multitracking and extremely low latency in mind. It's a daemon that runs on 
top of alsa.

-- 
Jonathan Harker
MUSAC
Massey University
http://www.massey.ac.nz/

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee.
		-- Tennyson


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