Creative Audigy 4

Creative Audigy 4

[James Courtier-Dutton]

For my work with Creative sound cards in Linux, Creative have kindly 
donated a SB Audigy 4 pro sound card to me.
It has an external box and a remote control.
 From what I can see, the outside of the box looks exactly like the SB 
Audigy 2 ZS platinum pro.

My first impressions of the card are that it amazing!
I can turn my external amp up to full volume and still get no hiss!
The sound quality it noticeably better than my other Creative sound cards.

Now to the problems.
The card seems to work quite well, except for the remote control.
Has anyone ever got the Audigy 2 ZS remote control to work?

The only way I can get it to work are:
Boot into Windows 2000.
IR works.
Reboot into Linux
IR stays working.

I would imagine that all I need to do is send some midi commands to it 
to switch it on, but I don't know which commands they are.
There is also a CMSS light on the external device, and I expect that it 
controlled with a midi command as well.

Does anyone have any clues ?

Cheers

James


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Re: Creative Audigy 4

[Lee Revell]

On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 21:15 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> Now to the problems.
> The card seems to work quite well, except for the remote control.
> Has anyone ever got the Audigy 2 ZS remote control to work?

Yes I got mine to work a whle back.  There is a sequence of commands you
have to echo to the midi port first.  Don't have it handy but you should
be able to google for it.  I think it's on the ALSA wiki.

Lee



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Re: Creative Audigy 4

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 21:15 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 
>>Now to the problems.
>>The card seems to work quite well, except for the remote control.
>>Has anyone ever got the Audigy 2 ZS remote control to work?
> 
> 
> Yes I got mine to work a whle back.  There is a sequence of commands you
> have to echo to the midi port first.  Don't have it handy but you should
> be able to google for it.  I think it's on the ALSA wiki.
> 
> Lee
> 

I found it.
I quote:

There is an issue with the Audigy 2 Platinum Ex soundcard
(and probably some other Audigy 2 cards as well), whereas the
IR sensor, MIDI and the buttons on the LiveDrive do _not_ work
at all until the LiveDrive is initialized by sending the sequence
of '0xf0, 0x00, 0x20, 0x21, 0x61, 0x0, 0x00, 0x00, 0x7f, 0x0, 0xf7'
to the MIDI port. Before doing this, even the LED on the LiveDrive
won't blink, as it usually does when a button on the remote is pressed.

As far as I know, this behaviour is different than with most
LiveDrives manufactured by Creative.

For more information see:
http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg09267.html

The easiest workaround to this is to add the following line to 
/etc/modules.conf

post-install snd-emu10k1
echo -e '\360\000\040\041\141\000\000\000\177\000\367' > /dev/snd/midiC0D1

[(Ed) The above is wrapped for formatting. It should be one line.]

It works for me and it should be distribution-independent
(with exception to Debian, where you change /etc/modutils/alsa
and run update-modules afterwards, Debian users will know anyway).



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Re: Creative Audigy 4

[Lee Revell]

On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 16:20 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 21:15 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> > Now to the problems.
> > The card seems to work quite well, except for the remote control.
> > Has anyone ever got the Audigy 2 ZS remote control to work?
> 
> Yes I got mine to work a whle back.  There is a sequence of commands you
> have to echo to the midi port first.  Don't have it handy but you should
> be able to google for it.  I think it's on the ALSA wiki.
> 

Here it is:

http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg09267.html

Lee



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Re: Creative Audigy 4

[Lee Revell]

On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 21:36 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> I found it.
> I quote:

Heh, I just posted the exact same info.

What do you think is the best long term solution?  We can't expect every
user to add that sequence to modules.conf.

This seems like something the driver should do.  After all, just because
you can set a register via /proc does not mean you should have to, if
it's something the driver should obviously do.  I think this qualifies,
since this is necessary to get the port to work at all.  Basic hardware
initialization should not be left to userspace.

Besides, the driver _knows_ whether the device is an Audigy 2 ZS,
whereas userspace would have to extract this from lspci or something.

Lee



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Re: Creative Audigy 4

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 21:36 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 
>>I found it.
>>I quote:
> 
> 
> Heh, I just posted the exact same info.
> 
> What do you think is the best long term solution?  We can't expect every
> user to add that sequence to modules.conf.
> 
> This seems like something the driver should do.  After all, just because
> you can set a register via /proc does not mean you should have to, if
> it's something the driver should obviously do.  I think this qualifies,
> since this is necessary to get the port to work at all.  Basic hardware
> initialization should not be left to userspace.
> 
> Besides, the driver _knows_ whether the device is an Audigy 2 ZS,
> whereas userspace would have to extract this from lspci or something.
> 
> Lee
> 

It is probably better just to get the program that is going to listen to 
the midi commands from the remote to send the command. That command will 
not hurt any other midi devices.

I am just looking for the midi command to turn the CMSS light on now.



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Re: Creative Audigy 4

[Takashi Iwai]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1272 bytes --]

At Sat, 04 Dec 2004 22:06:43 +0000,
James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 
> Lee Revell wrote:
> > On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 21:36 +0000, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> > 
> >>I found it.
> >>I quote:
> > 
> > 
> > Heh, I just posted the exact same info.
> > 
> > What do you think is the best long term solution?  We can't expect every
> > user to add that sequence to modules.conf.
> > 
> > This seems like something the driver should do.  After all, just because
> > you can set a register via /proc does not mean you should have to, if
> > it's something the driver should obviously do.  I think this qualifies,
> > since this is necessary to get the port to work at all.  Basic hardware
> > initialization should not be left to userspace.
> > 
> > Besides, the driver _knows_ whether the device is an Audigy 2 ZS,
> > whereas userspace would have to extract this from lspci or something.
> > 
> > Lee
> > 
> 
> It is probably better just to get the program that is going to listen to 
> the midi commands from the remote to send the command. That command will 
> not hurt any other midi devices.

You can put a script in /etc/alsa.d/emu10k1 when you're using
alsasound init script.

For example, SUSE has the following script to initialize the soundfont
and IR stuff.


Takashi

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 1281 bytes --]

#!/bin/sh
#
# load the default soundfont file automatically
#

. /etc/sysconfig/sound
test x"$LOAD_SEQUENCER" = xyes || exit 0

test -x /usr/bin/asfxload || exit 0

. /etc/rc.status

load_sf () {
  for d in /usr/share/sounds/sf2 \
           /usr/share/sfbank \
           /usr/local/lib/sfbank \
           /usr/share/sfbank/creative \
           /usr/local/lib/sfbank/creative \
	   "/windows/c/Program Files/Creative/SBLive/SFBank" \
	   "/windows/c/Programme/Creative/SBLive/SFBank" \
           ; do
    if [ -r "$d/$1" ]; then
      echo -n "Loading soundfont $d/$1"
      /usr/bin/asfxload "$d/$1"
      rc_status -v -r
      return 0
    fi
  done
  return 1
}

init_remote () {
  # this is needed for Audigy2 platinum EX
  devs=`grep '^[0-9].*Audigy' /proc/asound/cards | cut -b 1`
  for c in $devs; do
    if [ -w /dev/snd/midiC${c}D1 ]; then
      echo -en "\xf0\x00\x20\x21\x61\x00\x00\x00\x7f\x00\xf7" > /dev/snd/midiC${c}D1
    fi
  done
}

case $SOUNDFONT_FILES in
/*)
  if [ -r "$SOUNDFONT_FILES" ]; then
      echo -n "Loading soundfont $SOUNDFONT_FILES"
      /usr/bin/asfxload "$d/$1"
      rc_status -v -r
      exit 0
  fi
  ;;
esac

for file in $SOUNDFONT_FILES default.bnk default.sf2 ; do
  if load_sf $file ; then
     break
  fi
done

init_remote

exit 0