Sound Issues

[Dan Burcaw]

Hey all,

Here are my notes on various sound issues which you might encounter:

CD AUDIO
On modern macs, CD audio is passed digitally to the sound output.  On
older systems, this was done via an analog cable that connected from the
CD drive to the sound card (or sound port on the motherboard).

This makes conventional CD players like KDE or GNOME provide
useless. I suspect they are heavily used on the x86 Linux side
since most PC manufacturers still use the analog method.

The solution for mac owners that haven't been able to use conventional
players is to use software called xmms-cdread.

It reads CD data via the digital signal.  I

A xmms-cdread usage howto is available at:
http://www.imaclinux.net/gh.php?single=18


KDE SOUND
Regarding the KDE sound issue... this is the mix between a kernel sound
driver problem and how KDE's sound server handles the kernel sound
driver.  There are two solutions:

1) install a kernel update AND upgrade to KDE 3.0.
(http://www.terraplex.com/~dburcaw/kernel-2.4.18-0.9a.ppc.rpm)

OR

2) configure artsd for 8-bit sound rather then 16-bit sound.
This can be done from the KDE Control Panel -> Sound -> Sound Server ->
Sound I/O -> Sound Quality -> 8-bit.



I hope this sheds some light.

-Dan