[Wizard] Wizard audio - reprise

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 09:13:01PM +1100, James Cameron wrote:

| I'm still not happy with it.  I can still hear some tiny skips in 
| playback.

Hmm, I haven't noticed that at all.  Is that skips in the sense that the
sound breaks up (suggesting that the sound card isn't being fed on
time), or skips in the sense of a discman skipping (suggesting that the
sound card is discarding data)?

| Audio out connected to pins 1,3,2 of CN17

Likewise.

| No substantial background noise at normal volume levels.

Lucky sod :-)

| Summary of my doings ...
| 
| - Linux kernel 2.4.22 from Debian sources with CONFIG_SOUND_KAHLUA, plus
|   Debian's kernel-patch-2.4-lowlatency and kernel-patch-2.4-preempt built
|   using "make-kpkg --added-patches preempt,lowlatency --append_to_version
|   -wizard-fast kernel-image"

Yup, only I'm running 2.4.21 and didn't bother with preempt or lowlatency.

One thing I have done is fiddle the memory speed settings in the BIOS as
Mark Gaynor suggested: I have them set to AUTO/3/4/4.

| - irqtune 5 (maximum priority for "soundblaster")

Didn't bother doing this.

| - hdparm.conf for /dev/hda { mult_sect_io = 16, interrupt_unmask = on,
|   io32_support = 1 dma = on }

I'm running with no disc.  Have you tried playing music over an NFS
mount in case it's the IDE controller that's causing problems?
(Although the ethernet controller is really really slow, too. :-/)

| - mpg123 --aggressive --realtime

XMMS running at normal priority.

| - ogg123 sounds better, seemingly less skips

(Insert comment about the superiority of Vorbis here :-P)  Interesting.
ogg123 takes up lots of CPU time compared to MP3 or FLAC decoders - the
floating point unit on the Cyrix is less than spectacular.

| - mpg123 to wav file then bplay is quite pathetic ... slow disk?

It could well be the case.  Perhaps you don't have appropriate IDE
controller support in the kernel?

| p.s. The USB sockets appear to be unpowered on both my units.  Any fix?

Unpowered?  Hmm.  I'm running a USB keyboard off mine - with a USB
optical mouse hooked up to the port on the side of the keyboard - and it
seems to work, which suggests that the USB ports are getting power.
Perhaps the cable is wired wrong in yours??

Cameron.