From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Feb 2 9:53:44 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from bells.cs.ucl.ac.uk (bells.cs.ucl.ac.uk [128.16.5.31]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 98E9F37B491; Fri, 2 Feb 2001 09:53:23 -0800 (PST) Received: from scary.cs.ucl.ac.uk by bells.cs.ucl.ac.uk with local SMTP id ; Fri, 2 Feb 2001 17:52:22 +0000 From: Orion Hodson X-Organisation: University College London, CS Dept. X-Phone: +44 (0)20 7679 3704 To: Christopher Masto Cc: Cameron Grant , Andre Albsmeier , cshenton@uucom.com, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 4.2R pcm/sbc AWE records noise, not audio: 16 bit bug?; gus broken? In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 02 Feb 2001 10:35:04 EST." <20010202103500.A3028@netmonger.net> Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 17:52:19 +0000 Message-ID: <1216.981136339@cs.ucl.ac.uk> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG <20010202103500.A3028@netmonger.net>Christopher Masto writes: > On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 12:19:31PM -0000, Cameron Grant wrote: > > to be quite honest, i've done very little but sound stuff for the last > > decade, and attitudes like yours only contribute to my feelings of > > dissatisfaction with it. i feel honour-boud to finish what i started, and > > probably will, but you should remember that i'm not being paid for this, so > > i don't feel that you are in a position to make statements like those. do > > feel free to take the torch, i've been wanting to pass it on for a while > > now. > > Ok, my message was inappropriately rude. I was in a bad mood at the time. > > On the other hand, I don't think I should have to take over > development or buy you a bunch of sound cards just to keep things > working. I am a programmer, and I know all too well the temptation to > say "this old code sucks, and I'm going to rewrite it from scratch". > I also understand that interfaces change, and sometimes it has to be > rewritten. And I know that "legacy" usually means "I can't wait to > drop support for this". I don't blame you personally for the > situation. I'm trying to be honest here about the facts as I have > experienced them, not to attack or insult you. The changes in sound architecture are by no means arbitrary - it really needed work to support more recent audio h/w (pci/ac97). The sound driver architecture that Cameron has put in place is excellent. If you ever consider writing a driver and look at what other platforms offer you'll really appreciate this. It's clean and it's modular; adding new audio drivers is relatively straightforward as a result. It is unfortunate that support for some of the ISA cards got broken in the process, but there's also the tragedy that none of owners of said h/w has motivation to investigate. IMHO, we are in a better position with what we have now than before the ISA stuff broke. > Maybe we could use a list of known good/bad sound cards and chips and > where they can be found. I'd replace my AWE64 if I knew what was the > best supported card. On the laptop though, I don't have that option. This is an excellent idea - perhaps something along the lines of the ALSA soundcard matrix with tested h/w and s/w configurations. I can vouch for SB16PCI working very nicely in 4.x boxes, and CS4281 and CMI8x38 (though the drivers for these are not yet in the tree). Kind Regards - Orion. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message