Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 20:07:11 -0400 From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com> To: nik@iii.co.uk, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG, Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Subject: Re: Soundcard recommendations Message-ID: <19980601200711.A25605@ct.picker.com> In-Reply-To: <19980601122024.25677@iii.co.uk>; from nik@iii.co.uk on Mon, Jun 01, 1998 at 12:20:24PM %2B0100 References: <19980601122024.25677@iii.co.uk>
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nik@iii.co.uk: |I'm shortly going to have some money to burn, and I'm looking at getting a |soundcard. | |What would people recommend? I plan on using it mostly as part of my home |answerphone setup (courtesy Amancio's page), but I'll also be putting my |CD Audio (and BT848 TV card) output through it. | |I'll probably be paying some MPEG3 files through it as well. And it might |serve double duty under Win95/NT (should I decide that the games make it |worthwhile). ... Luigi Rizzo: |I'd avoid ESS and CreativeLabs (SB16 etc.) stuff: the former are |not well supported by freebsd driver although there is documentation |around. The latter are more expensive than anything else, have a |very bad internal architecture and no (decent) documentation |available. Sounds like for you, like me, MSW95 support is still somewhat important, and for the same single reason too--games! (Only reason I ever boot over :-) One thing you can say for the CreativeLabs stuff is they have solid MSW95 drivers because they're very popular cards. I've been satisified with my SB32 non-PnP (SB16-compat) in MSW95 & FreeBSD. Captures great CD-quality audio, and the wavetable synth is cool for MIDIs in FreeBSD & awesome for games in MSW95. Good card (for my soundcard usage). Having said that (and as Luigi alluded to) one reason to consider non-Creative cards is they aren't built for video-/audio-conferencing applications. Full-duplex (simultaneous record/play) is a hack on these cards, pure and simple, and according to Luigi and others that're up on the details, their clocks aren't very good. So if video/audio-conf is a big deal to you, that's certainly something to consider. If it's not, hey, grab an inexpensive SB16 card at a computerfest where they can be had dirt cheap. Be sure to get one with a Vibra16 chipset on it (it's the quieter one; the original SB16 chipset is a little noisy for PCM record). At the stores, there may be cheaper off-brand cards available with solid MSW95 drivers, but I'm not up on that. You'll have to research and check back with Luigi regarding FreeBSD support. Good luck on your search! Randall To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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