Recommended Sound Card? (Linux)

[dominic]

If you are using KDE, you should try making arts' the sound buffer smaller or completly desactivating arts (any way, arts is a software sound mixer, but with a card like that, you have plenty hardware mixed voices). To make the sound buffer smaller or to turn off arts, go in your K menu->Settings->Sound & Multimedia->Sound System. You will have a slider for the length of the sound buffer and a check box "Enable sound system". This check box will not make your computer silent, it will just disable arts and you will use the hardware sound mixer on your card instead (wish I personnaly recommand).
If you choose to disable arts and you are using system notification sounds in KDE, you will have to go in your K menu->Settings->Sound & Multimedia->System Notifications and then click on the "Player settings" button. Choose "Use an external player" and type the command name of your favorite sound player. "playsound" should work fine. If you play music trough amaroK, make sure your sound engine is not arts, or you either won't hear your music, have an error message or arts will start automatically when you play music.

[CSniper]

Well, I have tried changing the values inside .asoundrc to different values, no joy there.
I have tried this with the onboard sound enabled, it lags just the same through the sound card or the onboard.
I have posted this forum thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=152097
Which has revealed nothing, and I can find no ALSA forums.

Is it possible that this is a hardware compatability problem, not with the soundcard but with the motherboard? It is a P4S800D, I heard that there were some problems with it.

[ds01]

If the games you experience a slight delay in are Quake-engine based games, i.e. q1-engine, then this is completely normal. All Quake mainly 1 and 3 have slight delay in sound. Quake 3 is not so bad, maybe about 0.25 second delay after input is normal, but Quake 1 it's just the design and very noticable with the shotgun [in original iD Q1].

FYI there is no sound acceleration in Linux. There is only mixing done in hardware, but not all cards support that with ALSA (i.e. multiple sounds/channels/streams simultaneously routed at hardware level).

According to the ALSA homepage, not all Creative soundcards support this; although "Audigy LS" is not even listed - "SoundBlaster LS" is listed though as not supporting hardware mixing.

It shouldn't be too noticable playing games unless there are 16 or more channels, but there is something you can do to ease the issue. Make sure ESD is not running, and you can also try recompiling libSDL without support for it (ESound). If you run KDE at all make sure ARTSD is disabled, and see if that helps.

I read your post on Ubuntu forums and that shared IRQ could be a problem (is it the only one?). You may want to try manually assigning the PCI slot a different IRQ for the sound card if you feel you're up to that. I'd also just leave the onboard sound disabled if you can. You could also check the ALSA soundcard list for features like hardware mixing if contemplating getting a new sound card.

Overriding libSDL's sound output is not really advisable, and BTW "dma" option for SDL sound output is only actually usable for 'real' OSS drivers...

[CSniper]

Sound Cards that are listed as supporting hardware mixing are proving hard to find Nowhere sells Soundblaster Live series cards, or the very specific models of Audigy that are listed. I am unsure if any of the varients support hardware mixing.

The best I can get (especially considering the price) is this:
http://www.soundblaster.com/products/pr ... duct=14257
I don't suppose that's any good, is it? Audigy SE. Availible both online and at a local shop.

[ds01]

You can still get SB Live and Audigy 1 / Audigy 2 cards used if that doesn't matter to you. They are in that price range since cost is a factor for you - there are absolutely tons of them on places like EBay. Some shops have Audigy 2 Value 7.1 cards which ALSA says do h/w mixing, and new ones of those cost a little less than twice that SE you pointed to. The Audigy 2 Value can't do 24/96 if that matters to you (that support is sort of weak in Linux anyhow IMO).

Don't get the SE, do NOT! The drivers are still under development and don't even do what you want the card to do :-\

I realized your motherboard uses SIS chipsets. You may be able to reduce the PCI latency timings, but to be honest it may not be worth it to you if you don't have cracks and pops in your audio output. If you want to try, there are some good information at these places:
http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/linuxSoundLatency.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-hw2.html

Typically people usually lower their video card latency and raise their sound card latency. This helps with NVidia drivers on Linux especially. That's normally done for better FPS and to try to remove sound distortion [from sound card].

[CSniper]

Audigy 2 Platinum eX:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ ... cards.html
(3/4 of the way down)

Audigy 2 ZS Platinum:
http://www.overclock.co.uk/product.php? ... 2&view=rel

Audigy 4:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductI ... tID=310754

Sound Blaster Live!
http://www.epcbuyer.com/products.asp?recnumber=2815

That SB Live looks good, it says on the ALSA page that it supports hardware mixing, It's also very cheap.

[ds01]

CSniper! Are things more expensive in the UK, or is it just me?

The Live 24 isn't listed as supporting h/w mixing, and the NON-pro Audigy 4 is listed as "may not work" so be warned. Probably something to do with the million different revisions Creative does to their cards with that A4 being a luck-of-the-draw sort of thing. The Audigy 2 plat EX may be different from the A2 plat Non-EX, likely best to research that. The Audigy 2 ZS platinum link says Audigy 2 EX when you go there, but the Audigy 2 Platinum eX link has both when you get there. AFAIK the platinum pro is different [newer] than the platinum non-pro, but maybe it's just rebranded.

I know it's hard to find the right model of a Creative card that you're looking for as had this same problem getting an SB-AWE that worked with OS/2 back in the day