On Tue. Jul. 16, 2002 at 23:09:02 -0500 GMT, a lone cry was heard from
Curtis Rey
One problem is that Alsa modules is incompatible with some of the creative features.
I would agree if you mean it doesn't support all features of the card yet, but incompatible, no.
The OSS drivers are more compatible with the sound card but as yet I haven't figured out how to compile these so I can utilize the emu dspmgr and config programs.
Yes, the OSS driver does support the effects, but IMHO the sound quality is inferior.
With Alsa drivers the access to the effects is all but gone, such as digital delay, and modulation (chorus, flange, etc..).
This is not true, the tools are in development. It is in the alsa-tools package in the development series and is call as10k1. I really fail to see the usefulness of these features in everyday use- I do not want my well encoded Ogg Vorbis collection to be distorted. If I want effects for now, I would use (1) Sox, (2) a plugin in my media play, (2) Artsd, which is designed for such things, (3) ESD in conjunction with EFX (http://code.linuxcore.com/efx/) and some XMMS plugin. To tell you the truth, I don't even use the builtin MIDI because I find that no matter which free soundfonts I load, it still doesn't sound as good as Timidity++ with the EAW GUS patch set (http://www.stardate.bc.ca/eawpatches/html/default.htm).
Until Creative gets off their Lame arses and opens up the development cycle again for the OSS (and hopefully ALSA) teams, getting access and control over the full range of features (and their is almost a staggering amount of them) will be hit or miss at best.
Good luck waiting for Creative. Charles -- "Linux: the operating system with a CLUE... Command Line User Environment". (seen in a posting in comp.software.testing)