Trying to get some more soundsystem related progress
Published September 24th, 2006 in FreeBSD, sound system, kernelI started a wiki page about improving the soundsystem. The idea is similar to the wiki page about improving our linuxolator. It’s a way to tell the people what is currently available as patches (and where), what is broken and needs to be fixed, which improvements we like to see and so on. It’s maybe also a good place to list docs for soundchips. Currently the page about the soundsystem is a little bit low on content. I hope a lot of people contribute with ideas, facts, suggestions, pointers to helpful stuff, (pointers to) bugs, pointing out lack of docs and so on (either by modifying the page, or by mailing stuff to ).
With the linux page I was able to gain some momentum and several people are already helping with patches, running tests and so on (even little help matters). I hope the sound page will show a similar benefit.
So dear reader, do you play some music sometimes? Do you play an instrument which can be connected to some other stuff (MIDI)? Do you use acroread, skype, or some other linux software? If yes go to the wiki pages and read them please. When you’re finished please donate 5-10 minutes (I don’t mind if you sepnd more) of your time and try to tell us at or about stuff you think could be listet there (instead of smoking a cigarette, argueing about bad behavior of people around you, or similar negative stuff). Thanks in advance and trust me, you will earn good karma when you do this!
Hi Alexander
I hope this comment will not be left unseen and it will get a response,
if there is a more appropriate method for leaving a comment to you,
let me know.
Currently using totem I’m playing some mp3’s.
sound: snd_ich
fbsd 6.2-RC1/releng
xorg 7.2-rc3
gnome 2.16.2
problem 1
playing. Like the sound stream is disrupted. This is experienced
while cpu is under heavy pressure, which is common here.
I am wondering if there is something I can do to make the sound
stream fluent, or whether this is a general problem with the freebsd
sound system.
problem 2
now while at it.. flash and sound. the linux/unix flash player sound
system is currently based on ALSA, the linux sound system. is there
any development in the direction of courting the flash developers
to consider supporting a freebsd sound system model alongside
ALSA, or have there been considerations toward imlementing
an ALSA compatibility ‘layer’ ? Last I heard was that the flash
linux/unix team manager were open to other unix systems using
the flash plugin if possible (they changed from a license wording
that said it could only be used on Linux to a more general wording
that comforted the rest of the crowd, freebsd included).
keep up the good work.
Casper
another note..
we have:
cups – common unix printing system
can we have:
cuss – common unix sound system
or
cuas – common unix audio system
with your involved in the sound system projects,
have you heard anything about such a wonderful idea?
Hi,
problem 1: do a “sysctl -a | grep latency”. If something shows up in the sound system related area increase the value and try again (I have to use 64 for my snd_es137x). If this doesn’t help, ask on
problem 2: Search the multimedia@ mailinglist. Someone @FreeBSD.org wrote a plugin which uses OSS instead of ALSA (the flash developers provided some hooks for just this reason).
cups/cuss: CUPS is a userland solution for hardware which is connected externally via a connection which allows this. In the soundsystem only an USB audio driver would be possible in userland, but you would need special applications using this userland solution. All real soundcards (“real” as in connected to the PCI bus) need some stuff in the kernel. So you have to write kernel stuff in any case. So you can’t use CUPS as a pattern here.
Bye,
Alexander.