Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Information regarding problems with certain sound programs, which may be 
due to hardware problems with the motherboard or other peripherals, not 
always defective sound cards

The original sound card on this computer worked fine in DOS, and with 
timidity, playmidi, play (sox), mpg123, and mplayer at some radio and TV 
sites but not others.  Mplayer would not play offline, but that is because 
I forgot to specify -ao oss on this computer (the config file won't work).

So I tested about 10 sound cards in another computer, all but two of which 
worked perfectly.  Two CT 4170 would not work with any DMA settings.  The 
cards only do 8-bit DMA and I read online that they work only with DMA=1, 
which is not available on some motherboards.  (They worked elsewhere).

A tested good card worked even worse when put into the original computer.

DOS - diagnose played 8 and 16 bit digitized sound single channel but not 
both channels together, and would not play AWE sound.

Linux - Mplayer -ao oss played mp3 files offline, but not ogg or wav, and 
play no longer played wav, and playmidi played OPL3 but not awe.  (no 
complaints, but no sound).  Timidity and mpg123 kept working.  Mplayer 
would not play .rm or .asx files online.

Today when I tried to use an old CD-Burner it went from occasionally 
finding a music CD or CD-R (but not an OEM data CD) to never finding any. 
So I unplugged it to see if this made a difference.

Now all the sound programs are now working offline and I can also hear all 
the radio stations and Italian, Spanish, and Russian TV.  The CD-Burner 
electronics must have been messing up my hardware (changing some voltage)?
As the drive got worse, so did the sound problem.

mplayer on this computer still refuses to use the config file 
/root/.mplayer/config
so I specified -ao oss on every relevant line of lynx.cfg and scripts for 
accessing TV and radio stations.

> To summarize, if mplayer is not working offline (or it works at some radio
> and TV sites but not others) yet sox, timidity, playmidi, mpg123 all work,
> try a different card.

Or unplug any malfunctioning CD-ROM drives or other hardware and try the 
same card again.

Also make sure you have made all the sound devices and loaded all the 
modules with io, irq, dma etc. specified.  opl3 will insmod without 
io=0x388 but it won't play sound without it.

I think there is some midi player that requires high dma to be specified 
(dma16 for SB, dma2 for Crystal).


Sindi