Chicks_Hate_Me's Journal: Fixing Sound in Debian Linux

It seemed like my sound card (SB Live!) was constantly skipping in Linux whenever I did anything the required CPU cycles. I had the same problem in Windows 2000. The way I resolved it in Windows was installing the latest Via 4-in-1 Service Pack and update my Live! drivers. I tried setting up linux with Alsa thinking this might fix it but I was unsuccessful and gave up. I then decided to try to update the (emu10k1) Linux Live! driver and see if this would work. I had issues before I recompiled my kernel and I don't really remember the error messages. After I recompiled my kernel I still had problems doing a 'make' because the modules were still in use. I exited out of X and did the following commands:

rmmod emu10k1

rmmod ac97_codec

rmmod sound

rmmod soundcore

I typed 'make' then 'make install'.

Now I had to update my /etc/modules.conf per the README doc. Of course, since I use Debian I needed to add the line:

alias sound emu10k1

to /etc/modutils/aliases

when I did a 'update-modules' I got an error message in regards to 'unresolved symbols' for a via audio module. I went ahead and moved that module to a /tmp directory and issued 'update-modules' and it ran fine. The README stated I should be able to play an audio file and it should automagically load the required modules, it didn't. I issued a:

/etc/init.d/modutils stop

/etc/init.d/modutils start

this reloaded the sound modules and I was able to play audio.

The test was to play an mp3 in xmms and do an 'apt-cache search kernel'. Usually music would skip but it did not this time. I do not know if the problem has been resolved but so far, so good.

Update!

Looks like I still experienced sound skipping, I went ahead and posted the problem on Debian's debian-user mailing list. Most of them said to check out if DMA was set, I installed hdparm and did the following:

turin:~# hdparm -t /dev/hdb

/dev/hdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.76 seconds = 2.13 MB/sec

turin:~# hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb

/dev/hdb:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)

turin:~# hdparm -t /dev/hdb

/dev/hdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 106 MB in 3.01 seconds = 35.22 MB/sec

After I did this, I did not experience and sound skipping when playing movies or playing mp3s while running find and apt-cache search. Yay!