installing sound: some notes

So I have been hacking away to get sound working on my new box (you
know, the one I bought about 6-8 months ago?) and I have finally got it
working so I actually know whats going on.

The problem wasn't really using Linux to install the sound board, but
knowing how the card is supposed to work. Unfortunately, the
motherboard manual didn't come with lots of good info on how the sound
board works.

One thing I learned is that this particular sound board, given the right
drivers, can actually use SIX different speakers....sort of a surround
sound sort of thing. When setup this way, you use the MIC and LINE-IN
and SPEAKER jacks to plug the six speakers in.

Most of my problems revolved around this...and that the drivers were a
"little" broken.

So after upgrading my drivers and finding out that turning on too many
options actually caused the output of the speakers to stop working, I am
able to use the sound on this machine. In addition, I can use the
microphone jack to plug in a tape player and start recording those old
tapes I have.....hooray!!!

BTW, here is the command to do that if you are using the alsa sound
drivers (which by the way are the currently used drivers in the 2.4
through 2.6 kernel):

arecord -d 5 -f cd filename.wav

This will record 5 seconds of CD quality input and store it in
filename.wav.

You can then use something like xcdroast to burn this on a CD that would
work in any CD player. xcdroast can convert to cdda before burning it
on the CD.

A few specific things about the VIA 82XX built-in sound card:

In order for any sound to come out I had to use the alsamixer program to
turn the volume up. It is defaulted to off and muted. In my case that
ment the Master volume to 100% and to unmute the PCM and the Master
Volume.

For recording I had to turn the volume all the way up on the "capture",
unmute it, AND press the spacebar so that it would be the capture
device. Additionally, I needed the Mic (press the spacebar here too!)
and unmute Mic Boost. Mic Select was set to mic1.

I haven't yet figured out when the other volume controls come into play,
but for now, this is good for me!

Mike

-- 
Barsalou <barjunk@attglobal.net>
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.