Many Sound Updates Queued For Linux 3.19 Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Many Sound Updates Queued For Linux 3.19 Kernel

The latest pull request of interest to us for the Linux 3.19 merge window is the sound driver updates...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg2MDA

[narciso]

Unfortunately, Sound Blaster Z is unsupported once again.

[blackiwid]

Unfortunately, Sound Blaster Z is unsupported once again.

get over it creative has horrible linux support so just never again buy any hardware from them, especialy no sound cards

[DanL]

Creative is good hardware with crap drivers and support (applies to Windows too). And if they didn't make some decent hardware, they would just be a monopolistic patent-troll that bought up most of the competition and set back discrete sound cards for a couple of decades. Avoid Creative like the plague.

[ssokolow]

Creative is good hardware with crap drivers and support (applies to Windows too). And if they didn't make some decent hardware, they would just be a monopolistic patent-troll that bought up most of the competition and set back discrete sound cards for a couple of decades. Avoid Creative like the plague.

Unless you're building a retro box. Then you wanna start researching the bazillion different models of SoundBlaster 16 and head over to eBay to pick one up.

[DanL]

Heh, we had one of those in the family 386SX computer (which was not really retro when we got it in '89).

[david_lynch]

Heh, we had one of those in the family 386SX computer (which was not really retro when we got it in '89).

Back in the day, if you wanted to play doom with sound, you had to use an SB 16. (and of course you had to build a new kernel with the I/O port, DMA channel and Mem address of your SB handy)

[Er1ksson]

Unfortunately, Sound Blaster Z is unsupported once again.

Does that have anything to do with my X-Fi Fatal1ty, it started to sound like an old record player with kernel 3.17 i think (crackling sound)?

[slacka]

Linux's sound subsystems need to be replaced

Linux's sound subsystem is still stuck n the 90s. Sure it's fine for listening to music watching movies. But as soon as you need to some low latency playback/recording or want to utilize your card card's hardware acceleration, you're either out of luck or you have to jump through hoops.

I still have an old Aureal Sound sitting in my PC junk drawer and a Sound Blaster Audigy in my desktop gaming rig. Under Windows can do great 3D effects without any hit on the CPU and are usable for basic music production. Under Linux, JACK gives decent results IF you can get it working. Windows just works. MacOS and iOS probably even better, giving users full hardware acceleration and low latency.

Maybe Valve or Google will come to our rescue with a modern sound system. OSSv4 has a clean modern architecture that can produce low latency output and utilize the sound cards hardware. Unfortunately it's only well supported in BSD and lacks many drivers for modern hardware. In the mean time, I can always dual boot to Windows if I need to use professional audio software or utilize my sound card's hardware for playing and light duty work.

[Sundance]

JACK gives decent results IF you can get it working.

I hear you about Linux idiosyncrasies, but as far as JACK specifically is concerned, it becomes much easier if you use a dedicated management tool like Cadence. QjackCtl gets the job done, but Cadence gets the job done smoothly and easily.

For professional audio production (or as close as you'll get under Linux anyway), you will probably want to install a dedicated distribution like KXStudio. It comes with the latest and shiniest versions of LMMS, Ardour, Rosegarden and such, a real-time kernel, and pretty much just works out of the box. It also comes with a bunch of utilities, in particular hosts for LADSPA, LV2 and Linux VST plug-ins. Virtual instruments like the absurdly awesome PianoTeq work flawlessly. (Running Windows VSTs in, say, LMMS's Wine emulation, often works okay too, although it's more hit and miss.)

It's become possible to do pretty neat stuff using only Linux. But yeah, it's been a long road, and the road ahead is longer still.