Re: Trying to Make a SBAWE64 ISA Card Work in Wheezy
Martin McCormick wrote:
> deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> writes:
>> [1] http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue38/blanchard.html
>> [2] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO-11.html
>> [3] http://people.freebsd.org/~tanimura/docs/4236b.pdf
>
> I have had time to digest the information in those 3
> links and must say thank you for posting them. I now have a much
> better understanding of why I have always had trouble getting ISA
> sound cards, even the really good ones, to work under Linux
> sound. As I said once before in an earlier posting, when Linux
> sound works, it works extremely well so I have nothing but good
> things to say about it in general.
>
Yes this is true and we like and enjoy it :)
> I am now amazed that the ISA cards ever worked at all for
> any card other than Card 0. I also can see why there were
> problems with maintaining card order after rebooting even with
> udev rules in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. The problem
> basically boils down to not having enough resources free to let
> each card operate it's DMA access lines and interrupt request
> line without stepping all over the other card or cards.
>
> On the system I was trying to use, earlier versions of
> Linux allowed a PCI and ISA-style card to coexist but not totally
> peacefully. If Card 0 had audio on it, Card 1 still worked but
> you could hear rhythmic pops which, while not terribly loud,
> shouldn't have been there at all. I suspect that it was DMA
> contention as I think they did get 2 different interrupts.
>
You can check all of this in the kernel.
Basically one would check which IRQ/DMA is free and use this/assign it to
the card manually. I think it was done via driver setting, but probably
kernel can take those settings from the bios.
> I believe that wheezy and the newer versions of Linux
> sound are right in making it harder to bend things even if the
> results are not what we always want since the idea is to have
> stability and predictability. I will put a USB card on here and
> declare victory.
>
> This box is used to record 4 independent 8-bit audio
> channels at 8-KHZ sampling. That is positively horrible for music
> or high-quality voice but for VHF and UHF scanner radios, that is
> approximately the frequency range of audio one gets so it all
> sounds better than one might think.
>
> Maybe my ears are just shot but seriously, the radios
> sound quite normal but good sound such as music or broadcast
> audio is muddy and Mr. Nyquist is laughing as he spins in his
> grave.
>
> Martin McCormick
This depends on various things.
regards
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