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Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 07:12:18 -0400
From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To: Jack W Doyle <n9ogk@juno.com>
Cc: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: audio-related (audio CD loudness, rtprio au)
References: <19970529.081153.11854.0.N9OGK@juno.com>
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Jack W Doyle:
 |but in FreeBSD 2.1.7, I have to turn up the volume so I can hear it.  Is
 |it due to my SB16 card, or is there a way to tell it what MIN_VOL value
 |to use in relation to MAX_VOL?  I am using xcdplayer.

     On some soundcards like yours and mine (as I recall), Voxware doesn't
default the volume too high for the CD input.  If you want it to default
higher, try putting an invocation of /usr/sbin/mixer in your /etc/rc.local.
I'm not sitting at my PC right now, but usage is pretty straightforward:

mixer vol 50    to adjust the global card volume
mixer pcm 50    to be selective and just affect PCM.
    
But you want the CD input volume.  I'd guess that's "cd", but do a "man
mixer" to be sure.

 |2) This is somewhat related to above question, but not entirely.  Is it
 |possible to use 'rtprio 3 au -audio <hostname>:0' and then have the audio
 |server look up user-defined settings for the audio server?
 |
 |3) How do I get sound output to work on games like xboing, xgalaga, and
 |other X games?  Currently, I've been able to get the sound to work on
 |xboing only once and that's it.  I did this by using the -debug option,
 |but was not able to repeat the effect.  Otherwise it says it has problems
 |writing to sound device and being unable to flush sound device (yes the
 |soundcard is configured properly).

     Don't know #2, but it gives a clue about #3.  If you run some type of
sound server, you either have to kill it before running games that directly
access the sound devices, or you have to make the server close the audio
device when its not using it, and just open it on an as-needed basis.
Otherwise, other sound apps just get an EBUSY when trying to open it.

     rplayd has options to support this, but some other servers (e.g. NAS
last time I checked) don't by default so either killing that server or
patching its source is required to get it to let go of the audio device.
(I recall somebody posting said patches for NAS a while back; might grep
the mail archives at www.freebsd.org/search.html if they're not in the
default NAS package yet).

 |4) Is there a better approach to having sound than using NAS for a
 |single-user machine?

Might check out rplayd.  It'll let go of the audio device and works
reasonably well (for my uses anyway).

Randall