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Re: Sound ES1371 issues



Phil Brutsche wrote:

> A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...
>
> > I've been trying off-and-on for months to get sound working
> > on this box. The Readme's and HOWTOs and Dogpile searches
> > just aren't answering my questions.
> >
> > I've got an ES1371 (Audio PCI 97) sound card (from Gateway
> > Computers in an E-4200 box).
> >
> > First Question: When running "make menuconfig", I go into
> > the "Sound" entry and then press "m" on "Sound Card Support"
> > to make it a module. This expands into several other
> > options:
> >
> >     Ensoniq AudioPCI (ES1370)
> >     Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI 97 (ES1371)
> >     S3 Sonic Vibes
> >     Support for Turtle Beach MultiSound Classic, Tahiti,
> > Monterey
> >     Support for Turtle Beach MultiSound Pinnacle, Fiji
> >     OSS  Sound Modules
> >
> > Having read that some es1371 boards are actually es1370s, I
> > selected both Ensoniq and marked them with an "m" to make
> > them modules.
>
> Ok.
>
> > I don't really understand the difference between the OSS
> > Sound Modules and the others above that. I kindda thought
> > that all the sound drivers in the kernel were OSS drivers,
> > but this leads me to think that there are two types: the
> > ones that are not OSS, and the ones that are.
>
> Technically they're all OSS drivers - they all support the same
> programming interfaces.  The 'OSS Sound Modules' are what used to be known
> as OSS/Lite - a freely available version of the Open Sound System drivers,
> which are payware and available for many Unix (and Unix-like) operating
> systems.
>
> > Anyway, if I "M" the OSS Sound Modules entry, I see that the
> > "100% Sound Blaster Compatibles" includes "ESS", and I
> > wonder if this is necessary for support of my card. Even
> > though my card is an "ES" and not an "ESS", I still have my
> > suspicions.
>
> You don't need anything under the OSS Sound Modules.
>
> > So my first question: Do I just need the ES1371, or do I
> > need the ES1371 and the ES1370, or do I need the ES1371, the
> > ES1370, and the OSS with 100% SB Compatible, or do I need
> > some other combination?
>
> You need es1371 (based on your output from lspci below) and nothing else.
>
> > Second question: I'm assuming that I can install this/these
> > drivers as modules rather than compiling them directly into
> > the kernel. Is that a correct assumption?
>
> That's correct.
>
> > Okay, having compiled the ES1370 and ES1371 drivers in as
> > modules, and having done a make dep, make clean, make
> > bzImage, make modules, and make modules_install, and having
> > copied the arch/i386/bzImage file to /boot/vmlinuz and
> > modifying my lilo.conf file as necessary and re-running lilo
> > and rebooting, I'm supposed to see (according to what I've
> > read) references to the sound card fly by at boot time.
>
> Ok.
>
> > Yet I don't see such a thing. Furthermore, according to the
> > HOWTOs, etc, I'm supposed to be able to do a "cat
> > /dev/sndstat", yet that returns a "No such device" error.
> > The /dev/sndstat file does exist.
>
> Did you edit /etc/modules to load the sound driver at boot time?
> Unfortunately Debian's 'PnP' isn't as smart as RedHat's.
>
> > I suspect the problem is IRQ,DMA,IOport-related, but the
> > HOWTOs seem to focus on ISA PnP cards rather than PCI, so
> > I'm a little confused. I have learned enough to run "lspci
> > -v" which returns quite a bit of info on various cards
> > (ethernet, ISA bridge, etc); it also has the following:
> >
> > 00:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371
> > [AudioPCI-97] (rev 06)
> >  Subsystem: Ensoniq: Unknown device 1371
> >  Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 96, IRQ 11
> >  I/O ports at 1080
> >  Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1
>
> You don't need to worry about IRQs and what not - this is a PCI sound card
> - the BIOS takes care of all that at boot time.
>
> > When I try to play sounds (using sox or splay, etc, or
> > saytime), I sometimes get garbled sound, but more often than
> > not, messages like "no such output file" or "no such
> > device", etc. Hopefully someone can help me figure out where
> > to go from here.
>
> A quick summary:
>
> * Run 'modprobe es1371'
> * Try to play a sound file - I like to use the package sox for that; it
>   works better than cat'ing the file to /dev/dsp.
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Phil Brutsche                                   pbrutsch@creighton.edu
>
> "There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
> universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein

I appreciate your response.

Concerning the OSS/Lite drivers: So do I understand that the division of the
two categories (the five or six drivers on the outer level vs the OSS
category) are simply because the OSS ones came from a different source? In
other words, the kernel developers developed the ES1370/1 and Turtle Beach
and S3 drivers, so they left these in the outer level, but the OSS drivers
came from the OSS people and so were put in a different category? OK, I can
live with that; it's confusing to someone who doesn't know the history, but
that's okay; Life's a classroom.

The contents of my /etc/modules is:
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are
# to be loaded at boot time, one per line.  Comments begin with
# a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored.
# An entry named `auto' will cause the system to start kerneld immediately.
# Kerneld then loads modules on demand. `noauto' disables kerneld completely.

#auto
nfs
smbfs
vfat
psaux
serial
lp
3c59x
es1371


Running "modprobe es1371" doesn't show any output, and when I then try to
"sox wls.wav" or "sox jesus.au", I get:

sox: Usage: [ gopts ] [ fopts ] ifile [ fopts ] ofile [ effect [ effopts ] ]

Failed at: No output file?

(I think maybe I'm not providing sox with enough parameters.)

When I run "splay wls.wav", I get pretty sound. When I run "splay jesus.au"
I get no output, either audio or text.

When I "cat wls.wav > /dev/dsp" I get nasty squeals. When I "cat jesus.au
> /dev/dsp" I get rough-sounding but more-or-less intelligible sound.

"saytime" sometimes results in a quick blip, sometimes in a choppy "The time
is now four-twenty-blip".

When I run "mpeg_play [some_movie].mpg", I get good video but no audio. (But
then looking at "man mpeg_play" I learn that it doesn't play audio tracks, so
never mind.)

Running "xanim +Ae [some_movie].mpg", I get choppy video and no audio. Same
without the "+Ae" option.

The sound card worked well in Windows, so I'm confident the hardware is okay.

Thanks for any help!



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