[plug] Re: Duelling sound cards

[Kai]

Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Kai wrote:
> 
> | I'm trying to get XMMS to work with my SB Live! instead of using the 
> | crapping on-board sound card on my mobo, I've looked in all the places I 
> | think are logical and I can't find anything in KDE's GUI that says for 
> | the sound to be sent through the SB Live instead of the poxy on-board card.
> 
> In XMMS, I can go to Preferences, Output plugin, Configure, and see a
> drop-down list of sounds cards.  That's using the crossfade plugin
> (which you should be using anyway because it's better that the stock OSS
> one :-P).  I'm not sure if the standard OSS plugin supports this.  I'd
> be surprised if the ALSA one didn't.
> 
> KDE Control Centre has a "Use custom sound device" check box under Sound
> & Multimedia -> Sound System, which is probably the right thing to
> fiddle with but I wouldn't have a clue what you're meant to type into
> the box next to it.  My preferred solution is to switch off KDE's sound
> server (which is only used for making obnoxious noises anyway) and let
> everything speak directly to /dev/dsp.
> 
> Arts and Gstreamer are, for most people, just incredibly overengineered
> solutions for allowing multiple applications to access the sound card at
> once.  (Well, they do a few other neat tricks too.)  The SB Live does
> hardware mixing so this isn't a problem, and the main reason to want
> Arts/esound/Gstreamer/whatever goes away.
> 
> If you don't compile support for your onboard sound card into the
> kernel, you want have to mess with this.  Or build it as a module, and
> never load it unless you really want to.  (Automatic hardware detection
> may make this tricky though.)

Thanks for the info, I played around with XMMS's sound config as 
suggested, saved the changes but that made no difference....then had a 
look around KDE's control centre sound settings as mentioned above, 
tried the various drop-down options on the Sound I/O tab but after 
changing from Autodetect to try each of the options XMMS would crash.

Had a look at Garry's suggestion and this is probably the easy way out 
but I rebooted, disbled the card in BIOS and now I have sound through 
the SB Live but I'll have to play around some more because the sound 
quality and bass is still sucky, for the record I use Sennheiser HD 
212Pro headphones and the SB Live and on-board sound weren't added as 
modules.

Maybe I'll reactivate the on-board sound and modify a symolic link maybe 
like ln -s /dev/audio /dev/dsp1 or something so it can be done without 
restarting the machine

Cheers
Kai