On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 12:12:56AM +0200, Jan Niehusmann wrote:
> Is there a mixer available that supports the advanced mixing features
> of the emu10k1 chip (found on Soundblaster Live) ?
Three of them, actually.
> The only one I know is 'dm', a little but very usefull command line
> tool. As it's not yet in debian, I will ITP it if there are no
> alternatives.
I've tried to convince Alan Cox and Rui Sousa (primary emu10k1 developer)
that the current CVS version needs to be packaged. Rui's made the patch
and Alan's considering it for the 2.2.20pres and 2.4.whatever-acs..
You can get the CVS version of the driver at Creative's Linux non-support
site, http://opensource.creative.com ..
In that driver source there are utils/as10k1 and utils/mixer subdirs,
these are what would be really nice to have packaged. The names of the
binaries in the mixer dir are not really very good, but there's talk of
changing mgr_text to emu_mgr, mixer to emu_mixer, and cmd_line to who
knows what - I'm not even rightly sure how to use that tool yet. =)
> There is another point I'm not sure about:
> dm is part of the emu10k1-driver-package from http://opensource.creative.com/.
> This package contains some other tools. Although I don't use these tools,
> and I don't know much about them, I think they should be packaged together
> with dm in a package called emu10k1-utils or something like that. On the
> other hand, as I don't even know how to use these tools, it's not clear to
> me if they are working.
Perhaps we cannot retire dm yet, but you definitely want mgr_text and
mixer packaged if for no other reason than that they're a good incentive
to get the CVS driver installed on your machine, they're THAT MUCH nicer
than dm.
FWIW, I've spent some time working on figuring out how mgr_text works. I
have a pretty good grasp of it now and have written a script to set up my
own settings. I'd also like to write some scripts which can load and save
mixer settings (OSS and emu10k1) so the handcrafted script config method
will not be needed anymore.
I need a few evenings to turn my notes into user docs on how things work
now and something to load and save settings is going to take a lot more
work or risk being a total hack.
> As Soundblaster Live is a fairly common soundcard, I wonder why there
> are so few tools to use it's features. Being able to route sound from
> any of it's inputs to any output independently is a great thing. And
> having a programmable DSP should be even greater to people who need it.
I'd attribute it to many factors. There are two incompatible drivers for
one and they require different tools. The tools have minimal docs. If
you have a question about the inner workings of the driver, probably Rui
is the best person to ask - which means most everybody does and the guy
has to be swamped.
I think getting the current driver in the kernels is the best bet. Once
that happens and the tools are better documented, I think you'll see a bit
more interest in making better tools for the SBLive.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Free software developer
I am practicing a fine point of ethics. It is acceptable to shoot back.
It is not acceptable to shoot first.
-- Zed Pobre
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