Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 2,714
Guys due to lack of driver support for my x-fi I am looking for a cheap USB soundcard which I can plug into my PC for using with linux? Can anyone suggest a suitable model?
Cheap USB soundcard with linux support?
- Thread starter FordPrefect
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- 14 Oct 2005
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Why not get another PCI sound card, and have them both installed at the same time?
I was very shocked to see my HDA X-Plosion works out of the box in Ubuntu...the very first time I've been able to run a distro of Linux on my main machine, without first having to put up with the hassles of upgrading to the latest ALSA (or even a beta!) and then configuring dmix just to be able to hear other sounds while playing music and such. The only issue with that method, was that extra configuration was needed for certain apps to get them to output sound. Chucked in an SBlive, and everything worked, but the analog outs sound rubbish on one of those.
I know the X-Plosion is capable of on-the-fly Dolby Digital Live encoding and such, and these features aren't available in Linux just yet, but it's stereo output rox! I'd imagine you could get away with a cheaper CMedia based soundcard, though the DAC's and OPAMPS etc on those cards are usually single chip solutions and don't sound all that good. ALSA sees my card as a CMI8738-MC8, and loads the cmipci driver, if that is important to you
I almost bought an X-Fi when I bought this card, glad I didn't
I was very shocked to see my HDA X-Plosion works out of the box in Ubuntu...the very first time I've been able to run a distro of Linux on my main machine, without first having to put up with the hassles of upgrading to the latest ALSA (or even a beta!) and then configuring dmix just to be able to hear other sounds while playing music and such. The only issue with that method, was that extra configuration was needed for certain apps to get them to output sound. Chucked in an SBlive, and everything worked, but the analog outs sound rubbish on one of those.
I know the X-Plosion is capable of on-the-fly Dolby Digital Live encoding and such, and these features aren't available in Linux just yet, but it's stereo output rox! I'd imagine you could get away with a cheaper CMedia based soundcard, though the DAC's and OPAMPS etc on those cards are usually single chip solutions and don't sound all that good. ALSA sees my card as a CMI8738-MC8, and loads the cmipci driver, if that is important to you
I almost bought an X-Fi when I bought this card, glad I didn't
