diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes | 81 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 81 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes b/Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes deleted file mode 100644 index 84dee2e0b37d..000000000000 --- a/Documentation/sound/oss/sonicvibes +++ /dev/null | |||
| @@ -1,81 +0,0 @@ | |||
| 1 | /proc/sound, /dev/sndstat | ||
| 2 | ------------------------- | ||
| 3 | |||
| 4 | /proc/sound and /dev/sndstat is not supported by the | ||
| 5 | driver. To find out whether the driver succeeded loading, | ||
| 6 | check the kernel log (dmesg). | ||
| 7 | |||
| 8 | |||
| 9 | ALaw/uLaw sample formats | ||
| 10 | ------------------------ | ||
| 11 | |||
| 12 | This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats. | ||
| 13 | ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device | ||
| 14 | using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is | ||
| 15 | that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding | ||
| 16 | conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly | ||
| 17 | code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver. | ||
| 18 | And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-) | ||
| 19 | and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway. | ||
| 20 | In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows: | ||
| 21 | |||
| 22 | cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp | ||
| 23 | |||
| 24 | does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from | ||
| 25 | Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (available from the URL | ||
| 26 | below) to play many different audio file formats. | ||
| 27 | The script automatically determines the audio format | ||
| 28 | and does do audio conversions if necessary. | ||
| 29 | http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html | ||
| 30 | |||
| 31 | |||
| 32 | Blocking vs. nonblocking IO | ||
| 33 | --------------------------- | ||
| 34 | |||
| 35 | Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag | ||
| 36 | not only during open, but also during read and write. | ||
| 37 | This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more | ||
| 38 | regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch | ||
| 39 | is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html. | ||
| 40 | (Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free). | ||
| 41 | |||
| 42 | |||
| 43 | MIDI UART | ||
| 44 | --------- | ||
| 45 | |||
| 46 | The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with | ||
| 47 | no ioctl's supported. | ||
| 48 | |||
| 49 | |||
| 50 | MIDI synthesizer | ||
| 51 | ---------------- | ||
| 52 | |||
| 53 | The card both has an OPL compatible FM synthesizer as well as | ||
| 54 | a wavetable synthesizer. | ||
| 55 | |||
| 56 | I haven't managed so far to get the OPL synth running. | ||
| 57 | |||
| 58 | Using the wavetable synthesizer requires allocating | ||
| 59 | 1-4MB of physically contiguous memory, which isn't possible | ||
| 60 | currently on Linux without ugly hacks like the bigphysarea | ||
| 61 | patch. Therefore, the driver doesn't support wavetable | ||
| 62 | synthesis. | ||
| 63 | |||
| 64 | |||
| 65 | No support from S3 | ||
| 66 | ------------------ | ||
| 67 | |||
| 68 | I do not get any support from S3. Therefore, the driver | ||
| 69 | still has many problems. For example, although the manual | ||
| 70 | states that the chip should be able to access the sample | ||
| 71 | buffer anywhere in 32bit address space, I haven't managed to | ||
| 72 | get it working with buffers above 16M. Therefore, the card | ||
| 73 | has the same disadvantages as ISA soundcards. | ||
| 74 | |||
| 75 | Given that the card is also very noisy, and if you haven't | ||
| 76 | already bought it, you should strongly opt for one of the | ||
| 77 | comparatively priced Ensoniq products. | ||
| 78 | |||
| 79 | |||
| 80 | Thomas Sailer | ||
| 81 | t.sailer@alumni.ethz.ch | ||