Open Sound System

Hi folks,

I have an AMD64 XP3500+ system running opensolaris (actually, it's Nevada build 88). I've installed OSS build 1015 and audacity among other things.

Everything seems to load properly. I have been testing recording via the digital inputs on an M-Audio Delta DiO 2496 (envy24 driver). I can hear the input being passed to the output and it sounds fine. Unfortunately, when I try to playback the audio, it plays extremely quickly and sounds like noise. The .wav file looks fine, though. I can even take it to another system and play it there. The problem there is, though, that it sounds a bit warbly. I don't understand how that can be. I've tried recording digltal-in with both the Coax and optical inputs with the same results.

I've tried playing with the settings in ossxmix and I've tried recording at 96KHz as well as 44.1KHz with the same results.

So, two questions:

1. Any thoughts on what might be my playback problem on this system?

2. Any thoughts on why the resulting .wav file sounds "warbly" when played back anywhere else? The "warbliness" isn't terrible, but it's definitely noticeable.

Thanks.

dhollister wrote:Hi folks,

I have an AMD64 XP3500+ system running opensolaris (actually, it's Nevada build 88). I've installed OSS build 1015 and audacity among other things.

Everything seems to load properly. I have been testing recording via the digital inputs on an M-Audio Delta DiO 2496 (envy24 driver). I can hear the input being passed to the output and it sounds fine. Unfortunately, when I try to playback the audio, it plays extremely quickly and sounds like noise. The .wav file looks fine, though. I can even take it to another system and play it there. The problem there is, though, that it sounds a bit warbly. I don't understand how that can be. I've tried recording digltal-in with both the Coax and optical inputs with the same results.

I've tried playing with the settings in ossxmix and I've tried recording at 96KHz as well as 44.1KHz with the same results.

So, two questions:

1. Any thoughts on what might be my playback problem on this system?

2. Any thoughts on why the resulting .wav file sounds "warbly" when played back anywhere else? The "warbliness" isn't terrible, but it's definitely noticeable.

Thanks.

What playback do you use? ossplay? Totum? Rhythmbox? RealPlayer?

I used audacity for playback. I did not try ossplay.

dhollister wrote:I used audacity for playback. I did not try ossplay.

Try ossplay and see if it makes a difference. I've had problems in the past in terms of OSS compatibility with applications which rely on gstreamer which in turn rely on the SUn audio system which is emulated by opensound. The idea situation will be once OpenSound is merged and Gstreamer is compiled against opensound.

I tried ossplay, and it seems to work fine. Interesting. Any thoughts on the recording issue? As for playback, I guess I'm kind of stuck there, then.

kaiwai wrote:

dhollister wrote:I used audacity for playback. I did not try ossplay.

Try ossplay and see if it makes a difference. I've had problems in the past in terms of OSS compatibility with applications which rely on gstreamer which in turn rely on the SUn audio system which is emulated by opensound. The idea situation will be once OpenSound is merged and Gstreamer is compiled against opensound.

A. I'm not a Solaris user, but I thought some apps can be rebuild using SFE?

B. There is an envy24_nfrags setting (The envy24 driver man page explains it) which might help with the recording issue. I'm not sure where on Solaris it can be added so the driver will notice (see manpage, I guess).

C. What's the output of ossmix?

D. The 4.1 version has some envy24ht fixes not in 4.0 yet, but nothing that I know which is directly related to the recording, so I doubt it will help.

[edit: correct link title]

A: Yes, they certainly can. What are you thinking of?

B. I haven't played with that, but it appears to address issues with dropouts. Unfortunately, the problem I'm having with recording doesn't seem to be related.

C:

bash-3.2$ ossmix
Selected mixer 0/M Audio Delta DiO 2496
Known controls are:
peak.out1/2 <leftVU>:<rightVU>] (currently 0:0)
peak.spdout <leftVU>:<rightVU>] (currently 0:0)
peak.spdin <leftVU>:<rightVU>] (currently 0:101)
peak.main <leftVU>:<rightVU>] (currently 0:74)
mon.out1/2 <both>[:<rightvol>] (currently 144.0:144.0 dB)
mon.spdout <both>[:<rightvol>] (currently 0.0:0.0 dB)
mon.spdin <both>[:<rightvol>] (currently 135.0:135.0 dB)
route.out1/2 <DMA> (currently MONITOR)
route.spdif <DMA> (currently SPDIF)
envy24.rate <8000> (currently 96000)
envy24.sync <INTERNAL> (currently SPDIF)
envy24.spdin <COAX> (currently OPTICAL)
envy24.ratelock ON|OFF (currently ON)
envy24.actrate <decimal> (currently 96000)

D. Those appear to be for envy24ht, but I'm using envy24.

Thanks.

cesium wrote:A. I'm not a Solaris user, but I thought some apps can be rebuild using SFE?

B. There is an envy24_nfrags setting (The envy24 driver man page explains it) which might help with the recording issue. I'm not sure where on Solaris it can be added so the driver will notice (see manpage, I guess).

C. What's the output of ossmix?

D. The 4.1 version has some envy24 fixes not in 4.0 yet, but nothing that I know which is directly related to the recording, so I doubt it will help.

Pardon me for hijacking,

I'm trying to get my Delta 66 to work in OpenSolaris (It's also an envy24).
No matter what knobs I turn in ossxmix etc. I can't get any sound out of it.
In ossxmix I can see the bar graphs showing sound, so the sound gets that far at least.

Any ideas on what to do? Haven't got it to work in Linux either, but I only went at it for a few minutes, however just as OSS in Solaris, I can see the bar graph in alsamixer, but no sound.

I'd greatly appreciate any pointers on what I might be doing wrong
(Works fine in windows, so the hardware is hooked up right and in working condition)

I guess I'd ask you the same questions

1. What are you trying to play sound with? ossplay?

2. What is the output from ossinfo and ossmix?

As for my recording problem, I think increasing the audio to buffer latency has helped a bit. I'm starting to wonder if perhaps my system isn't *quite* fast enough, even though it was plenty fast on an even slower CPU when running Windows...

dhollister:
Hmm.. try:
A) Setting ratelock to OFF, or using a different rate when it's ON.
and/or
B) Changing sync source to INTERNAL.
And test recordings after these changes.

Do you have a copy of a recording?

P.S. I was thinking of rebuilding apps for playback, but I see you have the playback angle convered. Nonetheless, setting vmix1_rate=96000 may help a bit if you keep the ratelock and current rate.

I've tried with ratelock on and off. That doesn't seem to make a difference. I could try recording at 44.1KHz, but I'd really prefer to do 96KHz.

I could get a sample of a recording. I've done several, but they're all at 96KHz/24-bit. I could certainly resample down and convert to mp3 if you'd like to have a listen.

[quote="cesium"]dhollister:
Hmm.. try:
A) Setting ratelock to OFF, or using a different rate when it's ON.
and/or
B) Changing sync source to INTERNAL.
And test recordings after these changes.

Do you have a copy of a recording?

P.S. I was thinking of rebuilding apps for playback, but I see you have the playback angle convered. Nonetheless, setting vmix1_rate=96000 may help a bit if you keep the ratelock and current rate.[/quote

I'm afraid I got too tired of it not working and threw in an old SB Live! instead.

But my thread from earlier have the output of ossinfo. And I did not try ossplay, but osstest and the sound from Flash.

http://4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2293

There was a change in 4.1 hg repo today for envy24:
http://mercurial.opensound.com/?rev/c69b017c4338

I wonder if that could help.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have fixed the problem. Since then I've also tried running a 32-bit kernel instead of 64-bit. Nothing seems to really make a difference. At this point, I figure there's likely still some issue in the envy24 driver. I suppose I may look at the envy24 source some, but I really know nothing about how it works. I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier, but recording at 44.1KHz seems to work fine, even at 24-bit resolution.

Thanks for the heads-up, though. It was worth a try.

cesium wrote:There was a change in 4.1 hg repo today for envy24:
http://mercurial.opensound.com/?rev/c69b017c4338

I wonder if that could help.