Sound in Redhat!?

[Eriksson]

OK I am lazy but a little lost too.

I am currently fighting with RH 7.1 and I cannot use the sound card...



1

I went to the "control panel" and yes ..by choosing my old and ugly ISA soundblaster I could hear the midi piano tunes wery well.



2

After I did this I can hear when the OS starts the sound card at bootup..and I hear steady white noice from my headphones (speakers)



3

I cannot play any sound however.. I have tried several players but either they just freeze or nothing happens, they do not even try to play.. just nothing!?



Any input or helpful links please



I have been digging my self thru some howtos but it seems like most of them are old. I refuse to belive I have to recompile the kernel to install my sound card in RH 7.1

[Áedán]

Nice...

You'll probably find the sound card is using several drivers. The FM midi synth will be using an OPL3 driver, and this is probably what is making the white noise. This isn't uncommon for OPL3 sound cards. (Blergh) Not sure what the solution for this is.

The digital audio side will be using a different driver, and may require telling which IO port/interupt/DMA channel to use. Try checking the file /etc/conf.modules (or is it /etc/modules.conf?) and see what the drivers in there are being told.

A third thing you can try is using a CLI tool like "play" to play a sound and see what happens. This will give you tell you if the /dev/dsp device works.

AidanII

[Kaitain]

I cannot play any sound however.. I have tried several players but either they just freeze or nothing happens, they do not even try to play.. just nothing!?

Is it that they don't bother trying to play at all, or does the player "play" and no sound come out?

In KDE, all the sound channels are muted by default - you have to go into configuration -> sound-card -> volume and set your various channels to (eg) 50. This got me rattled when I first tried to play a CD and no sound came out.

The only useable player I've found so far has been xmms - don't bother w/ the others :nervous:

After I did this I can hear when the OS starts the sound card at bootup..and I hear steady white noice from my headphones (speakers)

My old ISA card used to do this - it wasn't very well shielded from other noise Might not be an issue...

[Eriksson]

Originally posted by Kaitain

Is it that they don't bother trying to play at all, or does the player "play" and no sound come out?

In KDE, all the sound channels are muted by default - you have to go into configuration -> sound-card -> volume and set your various channels to (eg) 50. This got me rattled when I first tried to play a CD and no sound came out.

Sorry guys for late relpy..been busy doing othere things, will look into this probelm tomorrow



The players I have do not even bother trying playing, and the Xmms player locks up..freezes it displays the name of the song and bitrate but makes no attempt to play. And does not respond att all.

[Kaitain]

I refuse to belive I have to recompile the kernel to install my sound card in RH 7.1

From what the reference manual for SuSE linux tells me, the configuration utility performs a whole set of automatic tasks that in the bad old days would have had us sweating for hours... it updates all the config files, and if necessary, it automatically recompiles the kernel to take account of new boot-critical hardware (eg a new scsi interface). For the sound-card, it shouldn't need a kernel recompile afaik.

Looks like your configuration tool has botched it... maybe try removing the soundcards profile and getting linux to reload it?

Does that old card work in Windows? Is it functioning properly? (I've had cards die of loneliness before). I've had several cards (so far, 3 modems, 1 sound card and 1 nic) all appear to work fine according to diagnostics, but crash several systems when asked to do their proper job... basically they've been damaged in some very subtle way that causes them to transmit erroneous signals to the computer that mess it up.

Sorry if you've already tried all of this - just trying to find more info...

[Áedán]

RH7.1 has all the drivers as KLMs anyhow, compiled off the kernel tree. You shouldn't need to recompile the kernel at all!

Check that /dev/dsp works - try playing a sound using the command line "play" command. Play a known good wav file. That way you don't have any of the overhead of X getting in the way.

If that doesn't work, then there's a config problem.

Check the /etc/modules.conf
Ignore any lines about the opl3 stuff, as that's the FM side.
Examine anything about sb, as that's the soundblaster driver.

If you can, try unloading the drivers using rmmod and the driver names, and then re-load the drivers using modprobe, something like

modprobe -k sb io=0x220 irq=7 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330

Obviously check that the settings match the card if it's a nonPnP card!

AidanII

[Eriksson]

I followed your directions to the best of my abillity.. and after several hours I just gave up and bought a decent pci sound card...

This was a little to steep for me..lol

Thaks a lot though for your time and effort