From owner-freebsd-multimedia  Thu Jan 18 12:33:36 2001
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To: questions@freebsd.org, multimedia@freebsd.org
From: cshenton@uucom.com
Subject: 4.2R pcm/sbc AWE records noise, not audio: 16 bit bug?; gus broken?
References: <20010117131850.A3402@cs.mcgill.ca> <3A670CA9.EEC14186@bowtie.nl>
Date: 18 Jan 2001 15:33:13 -0500
In-Reply-To: Marc van Kempen's message of "Thu, 18 Jan 2001 16:32:57 +0100"
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I've got 4.2-RELEASE with an ISA Creative AWE64 card and trying to
record analog from the soundcard. It appears to record harsh (or
nothing) noise instead of audio. My intent is to digitize out-of-print
LPs and burn them to CD.

Built kernel according to LINT and the examples in the handbook;
relevant parts look like:

    options         PNPBIOS
    device          pcm             # Creative, Advance, ESS
    device          sbc             # Creative SB PnP ISA card

And it appears like this:

    chris@Nipper<164> cat /dev/sndstat
    FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm) Jan 18 2001 13:39:58
    Installed devices:
    pcm0: <SB DSP 4.16> at io 0x220 irq 5 drq 1:5 (1p/1r channels duplex)

I can play a .wav file I grabbed digitally with "dagrab" just
fine, but recording is broken.


If I use "gramophone" from ports, the files it records are played back
as harsh noise. If I use "rec" from the "sox" port, it records OK when
I use the default 8 bit/sample, mono, 8KHz rate; but trying to use two
channels, 16 bit/sample, and 44100Hz sampling records nothing.

Some searching in the list archives turned up this gotcha from
October 2000 about AWE 16-bit recording not working:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=553505+555911+/usr/local/www/db/text/2000/freebsd-stable/20001029.freebsd-stable

    Shouldn't the manpage document that?  

    Here's a nice little patch:
    *** /usr/src/share/man/man4/pcm.4.org   Wed Oct 25 14:43:36 2000
    --- /usr/src/share/man/man4/pcm.4       Wed Oct 25 14:44:38 2000
    ***************
    *** 192,197 ****
    --- 192,199 ----
      .Sh BUGS
      Some features of your cards (e.g. global volume control) might not
      be supported on all devices.
    + 
    + 16 bits recording is broken for AWE cards.

So AWE is broken? The hardware or the drivers?


I also have an old GUS nonPNP but "man psm" points me to this tidbit
in "man gusc":

    BUGS
         Recording pcm sound data is not supported yet.

    FreeBSD                        December 18, 1999                             1

Any chance this is now working?  Would the non-PnP "gus0" be any
different than the PnP "gusc" kernel config?  Other suggestions?

If I need to get a new card, what are your card recommendations?  I'm
not looking for anything extravagant, just something that can do
16-bit recording and playback with a fairly noise-free analog section,
preferably PCI.

Thanks.




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