Audio drivers again?

Miller Puckette mpuckett at man104nfs.UCSD.EDU
Wed Mar 24 18:28:54 CET 1999


Hi list,

I'm now running Pd under Red Hat Linux, and (like everybody else) I've
run into some questions about audio/MIDI drivers.  Would anyone already know
the answers to these?

1.  I've got an OplSa3 soundcard and so far I've been using the OSS drivers
(the free ones from the RedHat 5.2 CDROM).  I notice that the ADC noise
floor (measured in the test tone patch) is around 45 dB, whereas the
SAME HARDWARE gets a noise floor of 20 dB under NT.  I've got a wild
guess that this might be related to which of the two "DMA channels" I assign
to "DMA0" and "DMA1"...  any other wild guesses out there?

2.  I also want to test the ALSA drivers.  I note in the ALSA FAQ (part
of the release) that ALSA comes with an OSS compatibility package.  So
is there any advantage to using the ALSA drivers "natively" (as s_alsa.s
does) rather than just using s_linux.c and having ALSA emulate OSS audio?

3.  Same question for MIDI...  is it likely to be worth the trouble of
rewriting the MIDI I/O code to address ALSA natively?

If any of you have any experience that might suggest answers to these
I'd be grateful!

Miller



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