[wplug] SOUND!

[Drew from Zhrodague]

> ALSA on 2.6 has 'just worked' on every sound card I've tried to use in the
last
> year or so, using Fedora Core 1 and 2.  I even have a professional M-Audio
card
> hooked into one of my PC's and it runs beautifully.
>
> The ESD thing is tricky- ESD is a broker for your /dev/dsp and tries to
> intercept stuff, but some times latency is really bad or programs think
the
> device is occupied.  For games you sometimes have to turn it off-
otherwise it
> should be transparent to most of your sound applications; ditto for artsd
in KDE
> apps.
>
> I have only one real gripe, and it's not Linux's fault- mp3 can't work out
of
> the box for a truly free distribution because of patent concerns with
> Fraunhofer.

    I've had pretty good luck with Redhat flavored things, and they
generally detect and setup the soundcard properly. Except my SB Live, but I
think it's firmware was blown away, or something is wrong with it -- it
hasn't worked in any PC in a long time.

    Might want to check aumix, and verify the state of the mixer. aumix -q
will display the current mixer settings. Be wary of some cards which might
have an amp -- some do, and volumes at 100 will be okay, others won't, and
will make distorted and fucked-up sounds.

    BTW, KnoppMyth works great after compiling mplayer, and installing their
codec tarball -- AVIs I've downloaded that wouldn't play with WinAMP, or
would play with no sound -- now ALL WORK. My machine is mostly idle playing
VCDs, and other videos. Amazing. Blows my mind. Cable tuner still won't tune
channels properly, tho, think it's the card.