Sound Blaster Recon3D Finally Seeing Better Linux Support

Creative Labs launched the Recon3D sound card the better part of a decade ago and finally patches have emerged providing for better Linux driver support.

The Sound Blaster Recon3D powered by Creative's SoundCore3D quad-core audio processor was popular years ago with gamers/enthusiasts and has tended to always be problematic under Linux, similar to many other Creative sound cards over the past two decades... Many users having no luck getting the Recon3D sound card working under Linux while others have seen varying degrees of success with different workarounds. But now thanks to an independent contributor to the ALSA drivers, Connor McAdams, proper Recon3D support appears long at last -- well, at least for the sound cards having the 0x0013 device ID. (The Creative Recon3Di was already supported by Linux and there appears to be other Recon3D sound cards with different device IDs, which haven't yet been added as quirks to the driver.)

The 11 patches add 276 lines of code but is mostly adapting existing driver support code that was previously written for the Recon3Di in the ca0132 HDA driver. The patches unfortunately are a bit late for landing in Linux 4.19, but we'll see if they happen to still get pulled in quickly to the sound tree.

Creative sound hardware has generally been quite problematic over the years. A decade ago following issues they open-sourced their Sound Blaster X-Fi driver, which once offered a glimmer of hope, but generally their direct open-source/Linux contributions tend to be incredibly rare.

Update: The work has been queued into the sound staging area for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel.