Re: [Openvortex-dev] alsa 0.9.4 + au8830 = sound is too fast

[Callum Lerwick]

> My problem is, that I killed esd, set it off in the preferences menu,
> and reboot the machine in order to be sure that the old binary driver is
> not confusing my mx 300 card. xmms and mplayer plays fast in oss and
> alsa mode.

Sure you have the latest CVS? This was fixed on my (and apparetly 
everyone else here) au8830 card a while back.

I have ESD startup on boot disabled as well, however stuff that uses 
ESD, like say GAIM, will happily take it upon themselves to start esd up 
anyway. ;P

However even then ESD has not personally caused me any problems after 
the fastplay bug was fixed. GAIM happily plays its alert noises through 
ESD with XMMS running, and I have never had the fastplay bug strike 
again even after leaving XMMS playing for days straight. (And I 
generally have XMMS running at all times I'm at my computer, which is a 
lot... ;) So the general stability of the driver is good.

However I once tried stress testing by running many copies of XMMS at 
once, I think I got to 4 and the machine hosed up really bad. Haven't 
yet dared to repeat this test again, really should sometime. I tried the 
same thing with the OSS drivers and eight XMMS's played for hours with 
no problems.

If you're indeed getting the fastplay bug on a recent CVS, thats either 
maddening, or perhaps a chance to fix the damn thing for good. ;P

> The other thing is, that the oss modules won't load
> automatically, I have to modprobe them by hand even if my modules.conf
> is 100 % the same as in the www.alsa-project.org page. Do you know other
> programs in a gnome environment, that might confuse the card? 

One way is to just pull the 'tui' driver from the savannah CVS and use 
that, I used this for quite some time with no problem(*), up until the 
ALSA driver started working on my card. Heh.

(*) Whats this about the OSS driver causing memory corruption? I have 
been noticing corrupt mp3's slowly turning up on my system, I was 
assuming it was from the fact my system has started suffering from an 
odd quirk of locking hard when its bumped too hard, (need to move it 
away from my feet and the falling distance of my heavy IBM model M 
keyboard...) with 512mb RAM and at least 256mb of it being used as file 
cache you lose a lot of data if the system locks hard. ;P Could it have 
been the Aureal driver the whole time? If its known to be capable of 
corrupting RAM, its really should be labled with a big red flashing USER 
BEWARE! ;P

Also, who owns the Sourceforge Aureal project? It seems to be quite dead 
for some time now. Can someone get a "This project is dead, everything's 
happening at the Savannah project." pointer posted there? The 
sourceforge page still seems to be the most known and highest listed in 
the search engines last I checked. ;P

Perhaps with the driver becoming mostly useable we should start a bit of 
a PR campaign. Attract more testers and eyeballs on the code. Perhaps 
pretty up the homepage and get it slashdotted. I volunteer for such duty. ;)

Also, what are the plans for merging with mainline ALSA? Will all the 
bleeding edge development still happen in the Savannah CVS and then just 
get pushed to mainline from there?