1/proc/sound, /dev/sndstat
2-------------------------
3
4/proc/sound and /dev/sndstat is not supported by the
5driver. To find out whether the driver succeeded loading,
6check the kernel log (dmesg).
7
8
9ALaw/uLaw sample formats
10------------------------
11
12This driver does not support the ALaw/uLaw sample formats.
13ALaw is the default mode when opening a sound device
14using OSS/Free. The reason for the lack of support is
15that the hardware does not support these formats, and adding
16conversion routines to the kernel would lead to very ugly
17code in the presence of the mmap interface to the driver.
18And since xquake uses mmap, mmap is considered important :-)
19and no sane application uses ALaw/uLaw these days anyway.
20In short, playing a Sun .au file as follows:
21
22cat my_file.au > /dev/dsp
23
24does not work. Instead, you may use the play script from
25Chris Bagwell's sox-12.14 package (available from the URL
26below) to play many different audio file formats.
27The script automatically determines the audio format
28and does do audio conversions if necessary.
29http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html
30
31
32Blocking vs. nonblocking IO
33---------------------------
34
35Unlike OSS/Free this driver honours the O_NONBLOCK file flag
36not only during open, but also during read and write.
37This is an effort to make the sound driver interface more
38regular. Timidity has problems with this; a patch
39is available from http://www.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~sailer/linux/pciaudio.html.
40(Timidity patched will also run on OSS/Free).
41
42
43MIDI UART
44---------
45
46The driver supports a simple MIDI UART interface, with
47no ioctl's supported.
48
49
50MIDI synthesizer
51----------------
52
53This soundcard does not have any hardware MIDI synthesizer;
54MIDI synthesis has to be done in software. To allow this
55the driver/soundcard supports two PCM (/dev/dsp) interfaces.
56
57There is a freely available software package that allows
58MIDI file playback on this soundcard called Timidity.
59See http://www.cgs.fi/~tt/timidity/.
60
61
62
63Thomas Sailer
64t.sailer@alumni.ethz.ch
65