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Date:      Fri, 11 Dec 1998 14:23:57 +0000 ()
From:      PB <pb@wave.campus.luth.se>
To:        richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk)
Cc:        freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: sane sound cards?
Message-ID:  <199812111423.OAA28325@wave.campus.luth.se>
In-Reply-To: <199812110051.OAA06401@pegasus.com> from "Richard Foulk" at Dec 10, 98 02:51:06 pm

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Richard Foulk wrote:
>
>Aloha,
>
>I've recently become interested in the mp3 audio stuff and the capability
>of playing CD quality music with my system.
>
>My question is; Are there any sound cards available and supported by
>BSD that support this function well?
>

Look out for cards that claim they are "Soundblaster Compitable" many are,
but NOT at 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, Stereo..

"Soundblaster Compitable"  Marketdroid invented term ? :-)


>All of the cards I've checked into appear to fail because there is no data
>buffer on the card.  At least not large enough to handle 44.1kHz stereo.
>My guess is that somewhere between 16K and 64K bytes of buffer should be
>sufficient.

Buffering is done with primary memory. Card only needs about 4K buffer.

>I've recently been using a SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold, with a 200Mhz
>MMX Pentium running 3.0-RELEASE.  It works fine while lightly loaded.
>But will start dropping audio data as the load climbs a bit.  A second
>or two of on-board buffering should fix the problem completely, and make
>it possible to play mp3s on slower systems.  (Dedicating a whole machine
>to this function for want of a few K-bytes of buffer seems pretty silly.)
>

I think your problem is IDE, I have seen this problem several times. As soon
an IDE unit is used in the system. mp3 playing becomes a lot easier 
disturbed task.

Advise .. use SCSI ONLY. Ofcourse it's a question of money too.. ;) 

If you really must use IDE, throw them to another computer which runs as a
NFS server.


          /Peter

>Does anyone make a sound card with a decent size buffer on it for it's
>audio input?
>
>
>Richard
>
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