[lug] decent cheap soundcard

[rm at fabula.de]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 04:39:43PM -0600, Ryan Wheaton wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I'm looking for a decent and cheap (sub $30) sound card that is well 
> supported under linux.  I used to have a ton of old SB16 cards lying 
> around, but gave them all away about a year ago.  I want to listen to 
> internet radio here at work (http://www.kexp.org rocks btw), and my 
> current linux desktop doesn't have any sound. This morning I stopped by 
> compusa to check out what they had and bought an el-cheapo compusa brand 
> that they had for 19.99.  It's a ALS4000 chipset and I got it running 
> with some ALSA drivers...It _works_ but it sounds really crappy and 
> skips a lot (any time I do ANYTHING in X there's a little hiccup).  This 
> makes me think that either the HW is crap or the driver support isn't 
> all that.  I also saw a SB Live! 24bit at compusa for $30, but didn't 
> find and documentation that says that it's well supported either.  So, 
> any and all suggestions are welcome...

Before you run out and buy another card: this is most likely _not_ the card's
fault :-)
First thing to look at: most distros (idiotically, if i might say) have the 
X-server start with a niceness level of -10 (read: ultra-rude). As a result,
any move of the mouse will cause the X-server to grab you CPU ... no wonder
your sound starts hiccuping. It's rather late over here so i'm a bit reluctant
to go into lot's of details - maybe you should read a bit about tuning your
system for better (read: lower) latency. A very good staring point would be
the PlanetCCRMA website (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/)

 HTH Ralf Mattes

|   
> thanks,
> 
> -rtw
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