How-To: Creative X-Fi

[go_beep_yourself]

They finally broke and released datasheets to both OSS and ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture).

When did this happen? And is the development by Alsa for the Xfi active or dead?

Oss, obviously, has released a driver before ALSA has even started development. Therefore I choose not to have Creative's section included on this page anymore. It causes users too much trauma trying to get it to work and OSS works great anyways.

Did you find a way to get hardware mixing with the Xfi drivers and OSS4 or are you doing without that?

[NullHead]

When did this happen? And is the development by Alsa for the Xfi active or dead?



Did you find a way to get hardware mixing with the Xfi drivers and OSS4 or are you doing without that?

You can check in alsa's card matrix for support from the Alsa team, but I doubt it'll happen any time soon.

I've been doing without hardware mixing. I use OSS and it works very well. I'm actually using a compiled source from OSS's git tree. This works very well for me.

I guess the only thing can tell you if you want a fully supported sound card is to go back to windows Sorry to be so blunt, but OSS is as good as it gets for the X-Fi at the moment.

[go_beep_yourself]

Try disabling ESD through the menu system, System>Preferences>Sound>Sounds, and restart your computer.

Is that similar to the hardware mixing Alsa does? Can you have sound from multiple applications at once using that with OSS4?

[Yellow Pasque]

OSS4 uses vmix for multiple sounds (ALSA uses dmix and doesn't necessarily do hardware mixing). You need to build OSS4.1rc2 according to the guide if you want vmix to work properly on your X-fi, because it was just fixed recently: http://mercurial.opensound.com/?rev=X-fi

ESD is used for system sounds in GNOME. I guess one can try to route multiple sounds through it, but most people/distros have moved away from this because of how crappy ESD is.

[go_beep_yourself]

I just installed oss4 using that guide (should be 4.1rc2 but I don't know how to check), and I have no sound from my X-fi. OSS seems to want to use my onboard audio only and that has nothing hooked up to it. http://pastebin.com/m676e663 I've been thinking about RMA the card but thought I should give this a try before deciding to do that, really tough call, can't get as good of a gaming sound card for xp in dual boot if I were to purchase something else.

[Yellow Pasque]

You can check your Build ID with:

ossinfo

If you're not using your onboard audio, then disable it in the BIOS. The next time you boot into Linux, run:

sudo soundoff
sudo ossdetect
sudo soundon

Make sure your speaker volume isn't too loud and run:

osstest

[NullHead]

Well OSS should work with your card, but I honestly wouldn't blame you if you returned it. If you end up returning it, I'd suggest you get this card to replace it. It has full out of the box support with ALSA. So what you see is what you get; least with that card anyways

[go_beep_yourself]

There's a lot of talk about getting the X-fi's working with alsa lately on the alsa-devel mailing list. They even say there's a way to put the sound cards in hda compatibility mode and use them with alsa right now. They need hardware to test it on, donations to buy the hardware, so they can test it themselves, and people that will test the alsa drivers on. Read the thread "[alsa-devel] Will there ever be emu20k1/x-fi support in Alsa?" and all of the responses here.

http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipe...ead.html#11214

[Kato_san]

If you look at the thread's at the alsa-devel mailinglist you will see that they now have a sort of beta ( backport ) driver for the X-fi series. You can find the thread's by looking for the key word “sbxfi”.
The new driver has support for more of the functions of the X-fi then the OSS driver.

Unfortunately I don have the time to test the driver myself. But maybe it could be of some use for somebody else here.

The development of the driver is very active so I suggest to keep a close eye on it.

[NullHead]

Thanks, Kato_san.

I have been keeping a very lose eye on it, but I won't test it until there's reported success stories. Until then, I won't spend any time testing it. There's other people that are active in Alsa's development that are more suited for that task than I.