Re: SoundBlaster Live!, /dev/audio, and bad sound quality

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Monday, March 4, Dave Sherohman did write:

> On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 01:22:38PM -0600, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> > In general, everything works fine, except that sending .au files to
> > /dev/audio has really lousy sound quality.  You can hear the sound, but
> > there's a loud hissing or static sound on top of it.
> 
> I'd guess it's either that the .au is 8-bit and /dev/audio is
> expecting 16-bit data or the .au contains signed data and /dev/audio
> is expecting unsigned (or vice-versa).

Possible, but I'd be surprised.  The same sound file worked just fine on
my old computer.  Don't remember exactly what kind of sound hardware,
but the following are the relevant module configuration lines:

alias sound opl3sa2
#pre-install sound /sbin/insmod sound dmabuf=1
alias midi opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
options opl3sa2 mss_io=0x530 irq=5 dma=0 dma2=1 mpu_io=0x388 io=0x370
alias synth0 off

Out of curiosity, is there any way to convert between 8- and 16-bit .au,
or between signed and unsigned?  A cursory glance at the sox manpage
doesn't seem to indicate that these operations are supported.

In any case, using play (from sox) to play the .au file works just fine.

Richard