Re: Sound-card question: HELP

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Sun, 16 Mar 2003 23:47:19 -0500 (EST),
William W. Austin <bill@34.mumb.atln.nrcrgais.dsl.att.net> wrote:
> 
> I had thought of perhaps getting an Audigy platinum (with the easy headphone
> access) but ONLY IF it supports soundfont loading/usage better than the SBlive! 
> does  (and I already know it supports the 4 speakers + subwoofer setup).

audigy supports 32bit DMA mask (while sb live does only 29bit), so the
chance would be slightly better, but i guess it won't help.
try the below at first.

> HOWEVER in reading both the devel and user lists, and in searching through the
> archives, I have not been able to tell whether the audigy handles the loading of
> large soundfonts any better than the live! does.  (On previous machine, the
> fonts loaded correctly; on the new one, after 8-9 MB of files are loaded, I get
> the ENOSPC (No space left on device)" message and loading terminates.  However,
> on on single occasion for reasons unknown the files loaded correctly -- all 125+
> Mb of them.  I still don't understand...).

please check /proc/asound/card0/wavetable whether the driver has
enough large virtual memory area.  the maximum size is configurable
via the max_buffer_size module option of snd-emu10k1.  increase this
value e.g. to 256.

if this doesn't help, then it's usually the memory fragmentation
problem.  although alsa driver tries to allocate a single kernel page,
the linux kernel sometimes doesn't give you allocate it well
(unfortunately).  this should be improved in the later version.

anyway, try to load the soundfont as early as possible after the
boot.  and just keep it.


Takashi


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