Re: Sound Blaster Live - OSS or Not?

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Thiago Vinhas de Moraes wrote:

>
> Hi!
>
> I have a Sound Blaster Live! PCI that works pretty fine for me.
>
> I tried to run loki's Quake 3 Arena for Linux, and after several tries, I
> started to read the README file, and it said that Sound Blaster Live does not
> work as OSS. I found a reference to www.opensound.com, where they sell OSS
> drivers for Sound Blaster Live for $35.00 !! That's too much money for a
> sound driver! I've downloaded a trial, and it really worked to play Quake.
>
> My question is: If the 2.4.9 kernel has support for Sound Blaster Live, why I
> have to pay for a damn non-GPL driver? Why it does not work to play games on
> linux?

sound support is hard... The folks at 4-front have the benefit of a
liscense from the vendor for their intelectual property property used in
the driver... That has two implications, The code is proprietary, and the
vendor must be paid... I don't imagine they're getting rich in the
business but if you have a card that has a chipset that is supported well
by them and poorly by the various other sound initiatives, you have to
decide wether it's worth it or not.

In any case your card is fairly well supported by the alsa-project... so
I'd recomend trying the alsa drivers

>
> Regards,
> Thiago
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Joel Jaeggli				       [e-mail]
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