Soundblaster Live! problems on Dimension 4550

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Soundblaster Live! problems on Dimension 4550
started by: diffster

Posted by diffster on Oct. 28 2005,08:35

Hi Everyone!

Thank you in advance for any suggestions you may be able to offer. I am brand new to DSL and to Linux in general, been doing my best the past few days to become accustomed to its use. First, I'll give you all the info about my system and then the specifics about my problem.

I am running DSL on a Dell Dimension 4550 with Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.66 GHz.
I am booting DSL 1.5 from the live CD that I burned from the .iso file. I’ve included the soundcard information below, and my speakers are harmon/kardon HK-395 (two satellite speakers and one subwoofer)

Everything seems to go fine with the video display, and the network card (everything displays nicely and I am able to surf with the browsers). The problem has to do with the soundcard or the soundcard driver. Wmix doesn’t open or display in X, and when I try to open a regular mp3 file (or an audio stream) in xMMs, I get the following error box [“Couldn’t open audio” Please check that… etc.]. Also in the shell mpg321 won’t open mp3 files either, the error displayed after mpg321 opens and displays the file info I get

Filename.mp3: No such device
Filename.mp3: No such device

I am familiar with using xMMs, wmix, and mpg321 from another computer and I know more or less what to expect when the soundcard is working.

I have done a lot of searching in the forum and with google but I’m really not sure where to go next. I believe that in some way the soundcard is recognized because when I open the DSL system stats I see listed under the hardware tab..

SOUND_FULLNAME="Creative Labs|[SB Live! Value] EMU10k1X"
SOUND_DRIVER="unknown"

And under the pci tab I see listed…

0000:02:02.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs [SB Live! Value] EMU10k1X
0000:02:02.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs [SB Live! Value] Input device controller

I should mention that I think the soundcard on my computer is a Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Digital (Dell) OEM. At least that’s what I found from looking at the model number on the Soundblaster Live! Card itself which was SB0200, according to the creative labs product listing at

< http://ask.americas.creative.com/wwengli....dio.htm >

SB0203 is the SB Live! 5.1 Digital (Dell) OEM. There actually isn’t a SB0200 on the list.

Some of the attempts I have made are running modprobe sb from the shell, and it gives me

../sb.o: init_module: No such device
… etc….

I have tried to find out what my soundcard settings may be from looking in the bios but all I can determine is that the irq=9, no other information beyond that is provided.

After giving up with OSS, the other route I have tried was to type “dsl alsa” before booting and then download and install the MyDSL extensions for gnu-utils.dsl, dsl-dpkg.dsl, and alsadebs.dsl

Then after I installed alsa from the MyDSL menu, I restarted X, and wmix was now open!! So I ran alsamixer, to make sure it was not muted and it wasn’t. So then I tried to open a .mp3 with xMMS and also with mpg321 from the shell. I made sure to set the output plugin for xMMs as the alsa plugin. Both xMMs and mpg321 had the same result, they opened the file without the error message I had before, and played the file, but no sound comes out of the speakers. Also strangely, it plays the file extremely fast, all 3 or 4 minutes are played back in about 10 seconds. Perhaps I need to change the preferences for xMMs now that I am using alsa, but I’m not sure what to alter.

However if at all possible I am hoping that I can find a solution to the sound problem just using OSS without having to download the extensions and using alsa.

I hope that this post has not been too lengthy. I have attempted to include all that I can in order to make this as painless as possible for anyone trying to help me. I’ll gladly post any additional information about the situation or about my system specs.

Thanks so much for any and all help!