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Music Media

Linux Sound Support w/ the Toast'n Jam PC Card? 23

Posted by Cliff from the dial-capability-cards-and-defunct-hardware-makers dept.
strredwolf asks: "I may have a challange for you. I'm looking for specifications on the New Media Toast'n Jam PCMCIA card, also known as a Noteworthy SCSI/Audio combo card. Yeah, I know the Adaptec 152x driver works on this -- but I want to get the audio working on it! Does anyone have one of these cards and have audio working on it via Linux? I'd love to program up a driver for them. I've already looked via Google for both, but aparently, New Media Corporation doesn't exist anymore. And I don't have any documentation on this card with the box (had to pull the drivers through a third party)." Yet another argument for a company at least releasing the specs for their hardware when they go out of business. Has anyone had any luck teasing out soundwaves from their tweeters using this PCMCIA card?
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Linux Sound Support w/ the Toast'n Jam PC Card? More

Linux Sound Support w/ the Toast'n Jam PC Card?

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  • Wow (Score:2)

    by Apreche ( 239272 )
    Ok, not only are you asking to get a driver written for an obscure piece of hardware (at least I've never heard of it before), but it made a slashdot news story?
    I think that before the people who write drivers for linux, whoever they are, make on for your pcmcia sound card they should make one for my Sound Blaster Live!, a slightly more common piece of equipment.
    I run Mandrake, and yes the soundcard works. I can listen to mp3s and the correct noises come out of my speakers. However, I have a Cambridge Soundworks speaker system 4 sattelites and a subwoofer. The bass is supposed to come out of the sub and the treble is supposed to come out of the sattelites. There are two wires coming out of the sound card that go to the sub, the wires and front and rear. The sattelites are all connected to the sub one wire each.
    I do hear sound with the current emu10k1 driver, however it is total crap. NO sound comes out of the sub while in linux, none at all. And the sattelites all get the same signal. That same signal is the entire range of sound. So I have every frequency of sound coming out of each of 4 very small, never supposed to play bass, speakers. Let me tell you it sounds like open ass.
    So maybe before they make your obscure sound card work, they should make it so that the common hardware works properly. Just a suggestion.

    • Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Clue4All ( 580842 )
      Wow, a nice troll. Your setup is broken in some fashion, sir, be it your hardware or your driver setup. I've had no problem getting full 5.1 sound out of both the kernel drivers as well as the OSS drivers found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1 [sourceforge.net]. Yes, even my subwoofer works (I'm thinking your's doesn't, period). Just a few hints.

    • Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)

      by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @02:08PM (#4026396) Homepage Journal
      It's amazine to me how you can gripe gripe gripe about shitty drivers for a soundcard that over the last two years has become one of the best supported (as far as features vs a windows driver) soundcards in linux!

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1

      Your stereo sound comes from your failure to install any of the supporting tools that you need to do full output. [Ie you are a dipshit.] It's kind of like installing windows 2000 onto the same card. It will work (stereo only) - but none of the fancy stuff until you install the creative software.

      With the SB Live! 5.1 in linux you can:
      - Access all of the inputs and outputs on the back of the card, on the internal headers, and on the livedrive, and even some extra audio channels accessible to you if you are handy with a soldering iron.
      - Indepently route, fade, and mix said audio channels around however you want - CD analog internal header plays to rear, PCM plays to front, center, sub, etc. The windows driver does NOT allow you to get this much control of things. With this mixer, you can bypass an effects channel on one source and leave it active on another, etc. You can set up routes so that you can cue music on your headphones plugged into the livedrive while you play other music from the speakers.
      - 5.1 analog output using the digital out as the center/sub analog (analogous to the windows drivers, but the application must support it - xine does)
      - 4.1 output - upmixed from stereo PCM (note that you cambridge speakers will also do this from a regular stereo stream. When you hear sound from the sub/4 speakers in windows, this is what you are hearing. It's just stereo upmixed by the card. The cambridge speakers actually do a better job of this than the card anyway. I'd suggest you try setting your speakers to something like the movie setting and see how it works when you are just playing stereo.
      - Raw digital passthrough of Dolby AC3 and DTS for decoding by your speakers. (Again the applicaton must support it - xine does)
      - OpeaAL 3D positioning with 2, 2.1, 4, 4.1, 5.1 speaker setups (The game must support OpenAL - Admittedly, not a lot do, but such is life)
      - Infrared support with the LiveDrive IR. The interface is funky (The messages come in as MIDI system messages on /dev/midi), so apps like LIRC don't yet support it, but there are a number of launchers, etc. that can use the IR functions of the LiveDrive)
      - full support of external MIDI devices and fm synthesis. Admittedly absent in the OSS driver is the support for wavetable synthesis. This is provided by the ALSA driver if you need it
      - direct access to the emu10k1 DSP and management of patches so you can write your own effects or control your sound in some really cool ways. (The tools contain the as10k1 assembler).. You could put a codec on the card, for instance -- make the emu10k1 itself encode/decode mp3, ac3, or something similar, write a crazy distortion filter, whatever. (The AC3 passthrough uses a custom patch to accomplish it) The possibilities here are really quite endless and something you will never be able to do with the windows driver.

      Incedentally, the driver at http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1 is really just a newer version of the driver in the kernel. The kernel driver (with the tools provided at the above mentioned site) can do all of the things listed above. The main reason to get the driver tarball or CVS version from the emu10k1 folks is if you need good audigy support.

      Happy hacking, dumbass.

      ~GoRK
      • if indeed these features are available and I don't have the correct things installed, then how am I to activated them? The driver and tools from the sourceforge project you link to is the one that I currently have installed. Obviously it isn't blatantly obvious or easy to do. It's great if something is supported. But it doesn't do me any good if it isn't very obvious how to make it work. It's not worth my time or effort to figure it out.

        • Re:Wow (Score:1, Troll)

          by strredwolf ( 532 )
          If you wanted eazy, stick with Windows.
          • I do, read my journal. However, you seem to be implying that you A)Agree linux is not easy and B) you think linux is better and would like to see windows go away. So C)shouldn't you want to make linux easier?
        • You say 'It's not worth my time or effort to figure it out.'

          So you have a relatively standard piece of well supported hardware that you're getting less then optimal use from and you post a long whining rant about the lack of support you're getting. Then when someone points these facts out you say that 'It's not worth my time or effort to figure it out.'

          Either you're new to trolling or you're one of those idiots that make people quit tech support positions...

        • Re:Wow (Score:2)

          by GoRK ( 10018 )
          Go fuck yourself. It was not worth my time or effort to reply to your first comment, but I give enough of a shit to at least give you some pointers and counter your misinformation. I don't want someone else to read your comment and think "Oh the SB Live doesnt work in Linux" and be discouraged from trying something new just because you are ignorant and impatient.

          If you successfully installed the driver and tools, then you had to have opened the same readme file that tells you how to edit the configuration. It's the one that starts "Installation Instruction for emu-tools-0.9.4 " and then right after that there is a section titled "GETTING STARTED". Did you actually RUN the X mixer? Did you RUN the init script or set it to auto run in the modules.conf? Did you open up the setup window in xine and check the "Enable AC3 Passthrough" or "Enable 5 speaker output"?

          Just a heads up... You will get a hell of a lot farther posting a polite question to the emu10k1 mailing list than just complaining on /. about your inability to think for yourself.

          ~GoRK

  • PCMCIA Sound cards in Linux (Score:3, Informative)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @01:43PM (#4026173) Homepage Journal
    There is no support for any PCMCIA sound card in Linux. You would have to write quite a lot of kernel glue before you could even begin to write a driver. Sorry :(

    I would suggest using a USB sound device of some sort if this is for a notebook computer. If that is not an option, then use a USB PCMCIA card and run the USB sound dongle off of that. This will be your best bet.

    ~GoRK
    • As I said before, I love to program up PCMCIA Sound and be the first one on the block. :) Besides, alot of glue has already been written with the PCMCIA-CS project.
    • Turns out that DMA support for 16-bit PCMCIA cards is nonexistant (although it would be useful in this case). There's two things that can be done to support it:

      1. Put in DMA support.
      2. Create a new DMA-less sound card which you just "shout" or "print" the sound to, a la Parallel port sound cards.
  • Does anyone have any info on other USB Audio hardware in Linux? I haven't been able to find any specifics for the SoundBlaster Extigy and M-Audio Quattro. I'm also considering creating a driver but would hate to do so in vein. I'm also interested in other USB Audio Hardware that works well with linux (20-bit, 48khz atleast). Thanks
    • Too bad that the Extigy, while having a fine 24-bit DAC, is forever limited to being a 16-bit audio device by the 16-bit DSP which is irrevocably placed in front of it.

      Ah, the splendors of marketing-driven technology.

      And no word on drivers for the beast, either. Last I heard, Creative Labs was still being tight-assed about specifications. (probably for similar reasons to that above.)
  • Wow, what a name. I wonder what Roxio thinks of it, since their product line for making good audio CD's consists of, yep, Toast and Jam [roxio.com].

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