[plug] Mandrake LE2005 Sound

[Leon Brooks]

On Friday 23 September 2005 17:28, David Dartnall wrote:
> I've had an absolute gutful of trying to get consistency in the
> sound system.

I used to be a bastard for me, too. I've switched to using just ALSA, 
and simply ignoring anything that _requires_ OSS to work. This has 
helped.

KDE also complicates the issue by including ARTSd. I have the KDE sond 
config set to:

GENERAL:
[ ] Networked sound

[X] Run with highest priority
Sound buffer [      |                                   ]
   92 milliseconds

[X] Auto-suspend after [3 seconds]

HARDWARE:
Audio device [Advanced Linux Sound Architecture]
[X] Full duplex [ ] Custom sampling: [44100] Quality: [Default]
[ ] Override device
[ ] Custom options

MIDI device [Midi through Port-0 - ALSA device]
[ ] Use MIDI mapper [    ]

Hope that helps.

> The sound is on the motherboard, ICH4 845G/GL Chipset AC'97 Audio
> Controller, maybe my problems relate to this.

Possibly. Some AC97 implementations are very CPU intensive and basically 
just crap. OTOH, the 855 mobo's AC97 (i810-style) works flawlessly in 
my cheap laptop. If your problems are not software, you may have just 
been unlucky with your mobo.

I've had excellent results with the Yamaha-744-based PCI sound cards, 
which were about 1.5x the cost of the cheapest cards, but they're not 
common any more. The cheapest non-crap cards I see are Sound Blaster 
LIVE! for about $60+GST, which is about double the Yamaha cards.

Cheers; Leon

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