Different problems with different sound cards. Rant.

[lcorken]

This is more of a rant than a question.

My old P4 system has generally worked fine with Kubuntu with a few weird sound issues.
2 GH P4, 2G Ram. original sound card Turtle Beach CS46XX.

The CS46XX seemed to work OK (or so I thought) until Maverick when it started to make loud motor-boating sound at most volume control settings. Seems to be a Pulse-audio problem? There is an open bug #483932. Amarok quit working at 2.0 but I didn't relate that to my sound card at the time as Kaffeine still seemed OK. VLC OK too.

With the Maverick Issue I decided to try an even older sound card from an old P3 system (CTS5803). WOW! Not only did that fix the volume control motor-boating but Amarok started working also, as did Dragon-Player which had been silent with Amarok. I don't understand why Amarok 2 stopped working but Kaffeine was OK. ??

But. Always a "But". After listening for a while I started noticing an intermittent warbling in the music. Kind of a tremulant effect as an Organ, not a vibrato as a violin. Well, that sucks.

Last week while in the big city (Portland,OR) I found myself wandering through a Fry's store and looking at sound cards. For about $20 US I got a SIIG SoundWave 5.1 PCI. Phonon calls it CM8738. Not too old, Not too new.

IT WORKS GREAT! YES! Even Amarok likes it. No more weird stuff.

End of rant. Thanks for reading.

Happy now Ken.

[Snowhog]

Re: Different problems with different sound cards. Rant.

Linux requires compliant hardware. No suprise there. Glad that you found a rather inexpensive solution.

[lcorken]

Re: Different problems with different sound cards. Rant.

Most hardware items out there come with a CD that has drivers and accessory software for other OSs but no consideration for Linux. It absolutely amazes me that our community can provide a distro that makes so much hardware just work anyway. When I put the new sound card in it did just that. It just worked. The only thing Kubuntu did was ask if I wanted to forget my old sound card. Well, yes, the old one sucked!

I wonder what the future holds for us. It seems that each new release uses a little more RAM. I would guess that is for more and improved features and to support more newer hardware? Soon this old P4 rig will need to be replaces with a new one or downgraded from KDE to LXDE or server. Or worse yet, Gnome. Well, I'm overdue for a new toy anyway. Maybe a 64 bit multi core.

Ken.