[Alsa-user] odd behavior with an AWE64

[Adam M. <am...@mi...>]

I have tried both Alsa 0.9.0-RC3 and 0.9.0-beta12 and they both act
exactly the same with my Soundblaster AWE64.  Specifically, many of the
functions related to OSS emulation seem to be broken.  I am trying to get
Speak Freely to work in full duplex mode which is why I started trying to
use Alsa.  However, many strange things happen.  Sometimes, recordings
will have a loud series of static bursts drowning out anything else and
other times, they are crystal clear.  Sound playback using OSS emulation
often causes a loud click or squeal at the end of a sound file.  Other
times, especially when trying to use full duplex, all sound playback,
whether through OSS emulation or native utilities will reduce to about
half speed with a loud chattering sound over the top.  A way to trigger
this effect that works almost every time is to launch sfspeaker in the
background and then use sfmike to connect to any server.  After receiving
audio for awhile, exit sfmike and kill sfspeaker which is how you normally
get out of Speak Freely.  At this point, you will hear a burst of sound
like the last part of a word that was held up in the buffer and after
that, sounds will be playing at half speed with the noise as I described.
The only way I've found to reset this is to keep connecting to the
localhost and sending short bursts of audio until the problem solves
itself.  Lastly, I have a mod player called xmp which uses the AWE64's
synthesizer chip and when playing any mod file, it never cuts off notes.
It sounds as if each note is playing all at once and never ends.  The
result is an increasingly loud racket as more and more notes play at once.

Any ideas as to what could be causing all this weird behavior?  The stock
Linux drivers work fine except that they don't support full duplex and I
can't mute and unmute the microphone with them.  I've also fiddled with
the commercial OSS drivers and it looks like they'd work, but I'd rather
use free drivers.  One last question is this.  Is it true that Alsa will
become the default sound driver in future Linux kernels?