[ltp] Some bizarre sound card activity

[Brandon Walters]

    I have an IBM A20m and have just installed the free version of 
Caldera's OpenLinux, specifically edesktop 2.4.    I didn't have any of 
the propretery system configuration or administrative tools that came 
with the commercial package, so I looked around and decided to give ALSA 
a try. I extracted, compiled, and installed the ALSA driver package and 
did everything according to the mini-HOWTO and the documentation.  The 
drivers were loaded with /sbin/modprobe (I also used modprobe with 
snd-pcm-oss and snd-mixer-oss so I could have backward compatibility 
with older linux sound systems).  I compiled and installed the utilities 
package.  Then I used amixer to unmute just about every sound device 
except MIC (I left it muted) and turned the volume levels on all those 
devices to 100.  Everything looks like it should in /proc/asound.  
Everything looked OK so I saved my settings with alsactl.  However, when 
I tried running XMMS, some bizarre stuff started happening.
   First I tried playing an MP3 from my windows partition, but I noticed 
that the music was slowed down by half and severly distorted. The 
distortions were mostly high pitched.  I could definetely tell that the 
song was playing somehow.  I tried using kmix to adjust the input gain 
level, but the input gain level had no effect on the distortions.  Kmix 
functions more or less - there are three devices though that have 
adjustable soundbars but question marks as icons.  I can adjust the 
volume of the distorted song with kmix as it is playing in XMMS.
   What could be going on here?  I used the CS461x ALSA drivers when 
installing the modules (I have a crystal soundfusion sound card), so I 
think that is OK.  There is a great deal of interference or distortion 
during sound playing.  XMMS just seemed to be running slower - it would 
take two or more seconds for the track timer to increment one second.  
I've tried moving the MP3 files from the windows partition onto my home 
directory on the ext2 partition, and to some degree this helped speed up 
XMMS.  But the distortion was still there and XMMS was still running a 
little bit slow.
  Now I know there are a good number of people out there who have IBM 
thinkpads with the same sound card that I do and that they are able to 
get it working under linux.    Is there an obvious solution to the ALSA 
driver problem?  Is there another option for me, in terms of other 
open/free drivers system to get my sound working on my A20m?  I have a 
working knowledge of linux and am not afraid to get my hands dirty - but 
I'm at a dead end.

-Brandon
  


----- The Linux ThinkPad mailing list -----
The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_mailing.html