[plug] Dual Sound Cards

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all..
Ok, I finally managed to get dual sound cards working in my Debian 2.1
Machine
It was pretty easy, the biggest bugbear was that I can't appear to load
the sb.o
module twice.. I had to cp sb.o sb2.o
and then modprobe sb ; modprobe sb2 to get it to work..
Not a real problem I suppose, but is there a way to load a module twice?
I suppose not really.. anyway..

The first card is an OLD SB16 non PnP set with jumpers, the second card
is an 
ESS PnP, that I set up with isapnp..
dead easy when you know how..(Which I did not, therefore it was not dead
easy :p) )

Now have /dev/dsp /dev/dsp1 /dev/mixer /dev/mixer1 and all work as
expected..

I tell you though.. Running 2 instances of mpg123 decoding 2 files off a
fat32
partition, the sound jumps are unbearable.. Mind you, thats a 44% cpu
load on a cyrix
M2-300 chip :p)

They only occur while accessing the hard disk though.

I tried irq unmasking, but it only succeeded in corrupting my drive.. Oh
well.. live
and learn. I guess that's why the options are marked as dangerous in the
man pages.

Would ( and this is probably a silly question ) moving the files from a
fat32 partition
to ext2 speed up the acces times much ?
I have no real experience in this..

I'm going to give Ingo's low latency patches a go next. I have read they
work pretty
well..

Anyway.. there ya have it. Never read anything on the net in regard to
dual sound cards
so that's how I did it.

Brad..