[Fwd: sound in CURRENT]

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Sat, 21 Aug 2004 19:13:13 +0200
Christer Solskogen <solskogen at carebears.mine.nu> wrote:

> -----Forwarded Message-----
> > From: Christer Solskogen <solskogen at carebears.mine.nu>
> > To: freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> > Subject: sound in CURRENT
> > Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:26:03 +0200
> > 
> > FreeBSD funshine.carebears.net 5.3-BETA1 FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1 #1: Sat
> > Aug 21 15:51:04 CEST 2004    
> > root at funshine.carebears.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/FUNSHINE  amd64
> > 
> > I cant get sound working on my SB Live. 
> > I have the following in kernel config:
> > device          sound
> > device          "snd_emu10k1"
> > 
> > It seems like I dont have any sound modules either in /boot/kernel
> > (yeah, i know the modules are named snd_*)
> > 
> > (no need to CC: back to me. I`m subscribed)
> 
> Could this only be on amd64?

There are no sound modules on amd64 yet; sound *must* be compiled into
the kernel.

I don't know about the SB Live; I thought it was supposed to be one of
the better-supported cards.  Apparently not.  <sigh>  And to think I
was on the verge of buying one recently in hopes of curing my own sound
problems.

That being said, all I can add is that sound on amd64 appears to be
seriously broken, with no fix in sight.  I've tried both the onboard
sound (nVidia nForce3) and my old es1371 card (which works fine on my
old i386 Athlon box), and both break down after a certain period of time
with "pcm0:play:0: play interrupt timeout, channel dead", after which,
sound is no longer useable until a reboot.

I've seen other reports from people who can't even get their sound
chipsets to work at all.  And whoever is currently maintaining the sound
code has been *awfully* quiet lately.  Feels like a waste of time
reporting anything.

Frankly, I'm rather disgusted with FreeBSD's sound support in general. 
Broken pcm devices, no MIDI; it's pathetic.  I'm really quite close to
giving up on ever resolving the sound problems under amd64 and just
installing a Linux distro, which actually, I may just do anyway,
regardless, since it's highly doubtful we'll ever catch up to Linux on
the sound front.

This is really a sad state of affairs, it truly is.  I can remember a
time with the old Voxware drivers when I could play MIDI files on
my old AWE 64 with soundfont support and everything, and it sounded
fantastic.  What do we have now?  Timidity.  Bleah!

Drastic as it may sound, I would vote in favor of scrapping the current
sound system altogether and porting the Linux stuff over to FreeBSD. 
Let's face it; they're light-years ahead of us in the multimedia
department, and we'll never catch up to them, not with the terrible base
we're starting from.

I wanted to scream when Voxware was pulled years ago, but I held my
peace (not like there was much choice in the matter).  But I never
expected things would still be in such a shoddy, primitive state this
many years later.

Not to mention the recent rash of buildworld/buildkernel breakages
lately from hurried, poorly tested commits.  Does anyone even bother
trying to compile their stuff anymore before committing?

Ah well, just ranting here. Don't mind me. I'm just seriously
disgruntled.  I've only been using this OS for the last eight years, and
never would have dreamed I'd reach a point where I'd seriously consider
abandoning it, but it's starting to look like that time may have come.
I really can't take much more of this.

Oh, that reminds me.  Time to pay a visit to FreeBSDMall and cancel my
subscription.  Not gonna continue shelling out for broken software.

Later, people.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"