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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes')
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes | 81 |
1 files changed, 81 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes b/Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..84dee2e --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +/proc/sound, /dev/sndstat +------------------------- + +/proc/sound and /dev/sndstat is not supported by the +driver. To find out whether the driver succeeded loading, +check the kernel log (dmesg). + + +ALaw/uLaw sample formats +------------------------ + +This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats. +ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device +using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is +that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding +conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly +code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver. +And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-) +and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway. +In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows: + +cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp + +does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from +Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (available from the URL +below) to play many different audio file formats. +The script automatically determines the audio format +and does do audio conversions if necessary. +http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html + + +Blocking vs. nonblocking IO +--------------------------- + +Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag +not only during open, but also during read and write. +This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more +regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch +is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html. +(Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free). + + +MIDI UART +--------- + +The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with +no ioctl's supported. + + +MIDI synthesizer +---------------- + +The card both has an OPL compatible FM synthesizer as well as +a wavetable synthesizer. + +I haven't managed so far to get the OPL synth running. + +Using the wavetable synthesizer requires allocating +1-4MB of physically contiguous memory, which isn't possible +currently on Linux without ugly hacks like the bigphysarea +patch. Therefore, the driver doesn't support wavetable +synthesis. + + +No support from S3 +------------------ + +I do not get any support from S3. Therefore, the driver +still has many problems. For example, although the manual +states that the chip should be able to access the sample +buffer anywhere in 32bit address space, I haven't managed to +get it working with buffers above 16M. Therefore, the card +has the same disadvantages as ISA soundcards. + +Given that the card is also very noisy, and if you haven't +already bought it, you should strongly opt for one of the +comparatively priced Ensoniq products. + + +Thomas Sailer +t.sailer@alumni.ethz.ch |