SB Audigy in Linux

[Moonark]

I just installed Mandrake 10.0 and I cannot seem to get my SB Audigy to work with 4-speakers. It will do two just fine. Anythoughs on how to easily configure 4-speaker support?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Does the driver support 4 speakers?

 

[drag]

Mandrake uses Alsa drivers?

Open up alsamixer from a terminal.

My card is a audigy, which is very similar to a Soundblaster Live 5.1 card. In the alsamixer you have several settings not normally aviable to a mixing app (unless it's designed for alsa).

On my card I have 3 outputs, and one input jack. One is for output front, one is for rear out, and the 3rd is for center AND subwoofer. One the Center/Subwoofer stuff you have one channel goes to center and the other to subwoofer, I forget which is left and which one is right... I think the left goes to center and the right goes to subwoofer, but I am not sure.

The subwoofer output channel is also called LFE, for low frequency effects.

The rear channels are also called "surround".

They would be at zero, raise them up to about 80 or so and you should have rear out working. Buy default everything is at zero for alsa stuff.

This is for audigy...

If you barely get sound or it sounds all staticy and crap thru one speaker it could be that digital output is on, to turn it off mute the channel that is labled "audigy analog/digital output" up in the "item: " description towards the top of the curses alsamixer app.

Hope that helps.

 

[pitupepito2000]

Hi,

I have an Audigy too. Here are some things to do:
1. Open a terminal, such as xterm, konsole, Eterm, aterm, etc and type the following commands
2. what is the output of "uname -a"
3. what is the output of "alsamixer --version"
4. type "alsamixer" and bring everything up, remember to mute audigy "analog/digital output," as drag had described.

Here are some good websites for you:
http://www.alsa-project.org/
www.google.com/linux/
www.tldp.org/

Good luck,
pitupepito

 

[civad]

The subwoofer output channel is also called LFE, for low frequency effects.

There's always something new to learn when one reads the drag man's posts

 

[Moonark]

I did as pitupepito2000 suggested...

for uname -a I have Linux zeus 2.6.3-7mdk #1 Wed Mar 17 15:56:42 CET 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

The alsa mixer is version 1.00
and I the analog/digital output is set to Off. Is there a newer version of this mixer that may fix my problem?

Still no luck...

 

[pitupepito2000]

how are you testing your sound? meaning what app are you using?
do all your other speakers work in other operating sytsems? meaning is this a Linux only problem?
are your speakers and all that connected correctly?
what does "lspci" print? does it show your card?
did you try playin with "alsamixer"? did you turn all the settings up? pressing "m" toggles between mute/unmute
if nothing works try upgrading to a newer version of alsa mixer.


Hope this helps,
pitupepito

 

[drag]

Not alsamixer, alsa drivers.

But his should be new enough. I've been using my Audigy with Alsa drivers since 2.4.20 something kernel + 7.x alsa.


Should work just fine.

Just make sure that the surround/center/LFE channels are all turned up, they are off by default. And make sure that you have the speakers plugged into the correct jack.


here is the order of the jacks...


(top of card. Were screw holds PCI card in place....)

Analog/Digital Out jack. These are for digital output (like AC3 output thru SPDIF), in analog mode they are for the Center/Subwoofer jacks.

Line in Jack. Like if you have a external walkman or whatever you want to plug into the card.

Microphone in jack.

Line out jack, Front 2 speakers.

Rear Line out jack. this is were your rear speakers plug into.

The midi port of the cheaper cards, or the Firewire port on nicer audigy.

(bottom of card.)


I forget all the time which jack goes to which.


It should work.... 2.6.3 is plenty new enough for your audigy to function properly.

Now if it's a Audigy2 then you may have some issues since it is slightly different, and newer. I don't know.


edit:

here is the wiki for sound blaster card. It's very similar to the audigy with most of the features and uses the same drivers. They are pretty much interchangable (with the audigy having nicer componates, of course)

Look thru that and see if any of the comments there help you out.

 

[Moonark]

It is just in linux when the problem is happening. If I boot into windows, everything works great so I know that it is not a connection problem. I will play with alsamixer some more, but I have not had luck with it

 

[Raincity]

I had the same problem with my Audigy 2. Turned out to be the rear output was muted in the Alsa mixer. Then I could not fiqure out why I had no cd sound. Turned out that Linux does not do cd to wave conversion like Windows and had to dig up a audio cable to fix it.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Raincity
I had the same problem with my Audigy 2. Turned out to be the rear output was muted in the Alsa mixer. Then I could not fiqure out why I had no cd sound. Turned out that Linux does not do cd to wave conversion like Windows and had to dig up a audio cable to fix it.

It depends on what sort of app your using to play your CDROMs.

The traditional way is to use it like a cd player. Thru the analog cord. This is because older computers (like pre 200mhz) and old cdroms (pre-20x) we not able to play it fast enough thru the IDE cable.

The IDE cable reads the song like data off of the cdrom and plays it like that. Which is much nicer because you don't have the long analog cord going thru your computer internals and getting all distorted from the electromagnetic radiation... Plus thru the analog cord your going digital--->analog--->digital--->analog. With the data reading off of the cdrom your going digital--->digital--->analog, so their is less to go wrong.

I have 2 CD drives, a Cd burner and DVD drive. I play audio CDs thru both of them, and have the cord going from the cdrom to the soundcard on neither.

But for the life of me I can't remember what the stupid name of that. Their is a word for reading audio like data and playing it rather then thru the cd-player analog cord.... CDDA?

Use Alsaplayer. That does it thru the IDE/data cable.

Anyways, I ripped all my CD's into Ogg Vorbis and Flac files a while ago. Much more convientent and you don't have to worry about screwing up your CDs. Check out cdparanoia, and front ends like Xcdroast to get the best quality out of your rips. (also can compinsate for scratches as long as the data is there. Saved plenty of almost-ruined CDs.)

 

[Raincity]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: Raincity
I had the same problem with my Audigy 2. Turned out to be the rear output was muted in the Alsa mixer. Then I could not fiqure out why I had no cd sound. Turned out that Linux does not do cd to wave conversion like Windows and had to dig up a audio cable to fix it.

It depends on what sort of app your using to play your CDROMs.

The traditional way is to use it like a cd player. Thru the analog cord. This is because older computers (like pre 200mhz) and old cdroms (pre-20x) we not able to play it fast enough thru the IDE cable.

The IDE cable reads the song like data off of the cdrom and plays it like that. Which is much nicer because you don't have the long analog cord going thru your computer internals and getting all distorted from the electromagnetic radiation... Plus thru the analog cord your going digital--->analog--->digital--->analog. With the data reading off of the cdrom your going digital--->digital--->analog, so their is less to go wrong.

I have 2 CD drives, a Cd burner and DVD drive. I play audio CDs thru both of them, and have the cord going from the cdrom to the soundcard on neither.

But for the life of me I can't remember what the stupid name of that. Their is a word for reading audio like data and playing it rather then thru the cd-player analog cord.... CDDA?

Use Alsaplayer. That does it thru the IDE/data cable.

Anyways, I ripped all my CD's into Ogg Vorbis and Flac files a while ago. Much more convientent and you don't have to worry about screwing up your CDs. Check out cdparanoia, and front ends like Xcdroast to get the best quality out of your rips. (also can compinsate for scratches as long as the data is there. Saved plenty of almost-ruined CDs.)

Thanks, I will look into this.

 

[Moonark]

Fixed It!!!!! Not sure what happened, but I installed XMMS with the ALSA plugin and everything seems to function properly. I was previously using the Totem Media Player, which I am not sure if it has ALSA support or not. Haven't looked into that yet. To me it seems that way, but I could be wrong because all system sounds such as error messages play on 4 speakers. I configured Totem to use 4 speakers, but nothing happens... If anyone knows how to get Totem to work could you let me know...So far though, I believe 4-speaker support with my Audigy does work

 

[pitupepito2000]

I would recommend that for playing music and stuff like that in linux you use mpd and one of it's client. It's a very nice project. MPD stands for musci player daemon, and it runs in the background, and you can have all different types of clients connected to it, form command line to gui, to web based ones. Here's a link to it:
www.musicpd.org

Good luck,
pitupepito