Ubuntu Manpage: snd_emu10kx — Creative SoundBlaster Live! and Audigy sound cards device driver

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NAME

     snd_emu10kx — Creative SoundBlaster Live! and Audigy sound cards device driver

SYNOPSIS

     To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel
     configuration file:

           device sound
           device snd_emu10kx

     Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in
     loader.conf(5):

           snd_emu10kx_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

     The snd_emu10kx bridge driver allows the generic audio driver sound(4) to attach to Creative
     sound cards based on the EMU10K1, CA0100, CA0101, CA0102 and CA0108 DSPs.

     The snd_emu10kx sound cards have a PCM part, which is accessible through one to five pcm(4)
     devices (see MULTICHANNEL PLAYBACK for details), and MPU401-compatible MIDI I/O controller,
     which is accessible through the midi device.  Wave table synthesizer support is not
     available.

HARDWARE

     The snd_emu10kx driver supports the following sound cards:

     •   Creative Sound Blaster Live! (EMU10K1 Chipset).  Both PCM and MIDI interfaces are
         available.
     •   Creative Sound Blaster Audigy (CA0100 and CA0101 Chipset).  PCM and two MIDI interfaces
         available.
     •   Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 and Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 (CA0102 Chipset).
         PCM support is limited to 48kHz/16 bit stereo (192kHz/24 bit part of this chipset is not
         supported).
     •   Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value (CA0108 Chipset).  PCM support is limited to
         48kHz/16 bit stereo (192kHz/24 bit part of this chipset is not supported).  There is no
         MIDI support for this card.

     The snd_emu10kx driver does not support the following sound cards (although they have names
     similar to some supported ones):

     •   Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-Bit, identified by FreeBSD as "emu10k1x Soundblaster
         Live! 5.1".
     •   Creative Sound Blaster Audigy LS / ES, identified by FreeBSD as "CA0106-DAT Audigy LS".
     •   All other Creative sound cards with -DAT chipsets.
     •   All Creative X-Fi series sound cards.

MULTICHANNEL PLAYBACK

     By default the snd_emu10kx driver is loaded with multichannel playback capabilities enabled.
     If you do not set the hint.emu10kx.0.multichannel_disabled option in your loader.conf(5)
     configuration file you will get up to five DSP devices, one for each sound card output.  You
     can use additional software (like audio/pulseaudio from The Ports Collection) to do sound
     stream demultiplexing.  Only “FRONT” output can play and record sound from external sources
     (like line or S/PDIF inputs).

MULTICHANNEL RECORDING

By default multichannel recording capabilities are not enabled when you load the snd_emu10kx
driver. If you enable the hint.emu10kx.0.multichannel_recording option in loader.conf(5)
you will get one more DSP device that is rate-locked to 48kHz/16bit/mono. This is actually
48kHz/16bit/32 channels on SB Live! cards and 48kHz/16bit/64channels on Audigy cards, but
the current implementation of the sound subsystem does not support such an amount of PCM
channels. This device can not be opened for read, thus confusing many applications.

Within a multichannel stream, the first half (0-15 or 0-31) is a copy of all DSP outputs,
the second half (15-30 or 32-63) is a copy of some DSP inputs. On Live! cards the last
substream (31) is used as a sync stream and is always set to 0xc0de. Audigy cards do not
need such sync data, because a stream always starts with substream 0.

SB Live! substream map (in byte offsets, each substream is 2 bytes LE)
Offset Substream

+0x00..+0x1E PCM streams 0..15

+0x20, +0x22 Empty

+0x24..+0x2A PCM inputs: front left, front right, rear left, rear right, center, sub

+0x2C..+0x3C DSP inputs 0..8:

+0x3E sync substream (0xc0de)

Audigy substream map (in byte offsets, each substream is 2 bytes LE)
Offset Substream

+0x00..+0x3E PCM streams 0..31

+0x40..+0x5E PCM inputs: front LR, rear LR, center, sub, ...

+0x60..+0x7E DSP inputs 0..16

OSS MIXER CONTROLS

     These are the controls available through the standard OSS programming interface.  You can
     use mixer(8) to change them.

     On EMU10K1-based cards the OSS mixer directly controls the AC97 codec.  On newer cards the
     OSS mixer controls some parameters of the AC97 codec and some DSP-based mixer controls.

     "vol" mixer control for the overall sound volume.

     "pcm" mixer control for the PCM playback volume.  It controls only front output volume in
     multichannel mode and all output volume in single channel mode.

     "rec" mixer control acts very differently on EMU10K1 and other cards.  On EMU10K1 cards it
     controls the AC97 codec recording level.  On non-EMU10K1 cards it controls the amount of
     AC97 “stereo mix”
      entering the DSP.  AC97 recording level and AC97 recording source are fixed on CA0100,
     CA0101, CA0102 and CA0108 cards.  The AC97 recording levels are always set to maximum and
     recording source is always “stereo mix”.

     "dig1" is a CD S/PDIF (on-card) volume control

     "dig2" is an AudigyDrive S/PDIF (Audigy series) or TOSLink (SB Live! series) volume control

     "dig3" is an on-card S/PDIF volume control

     "line2" is AudigyDrive "Line In 2" volume control

     "line3" is AudigyDrive "AUX In 2" volume control

     Other OSS mixer controls control the inputs of the AC97 codec.

PRIVATE DEVICE CONTROLS

     You can control some of EMU10Kx's operation and configuration parameters through
     dev.emu10kx.⟨X⟩ sysctls.  These sysctl(8) values are temporary and should not be relied
     upon.

DRIVER CONFIGURATION

     Loader tunables are used to set driver configuration.  Tunables can be set at the loader(8)
     prompt before booting the kernel or they can be stored in /boot/loader.conf.  These tunables
     cannot be changed from a machine sysctl(8) entry after boot, but you can change them using
     kenv(1) before loading the snd_emu10kx driver.

     hint.emu10kx.⟨X⟩.disabled
             Disables loading a driver instance.

     hint.emu10kx.⟨X⟩.multichannel_disabled
             Disables multichannel playback support, when one card is represented as several PCM
             devices.

     hint.emu10kx.⟨X⟩.multichannel_recording
             Enables experimental multichannel recording support.

     hint.emu10kx.⟨X⟩.debug
             Set debug output level.

             0   No additional debug options enabled

             1   Enables all DSP outputs to be connected, even those that are known to be unused
                 on a particular card.

             2   Additional debug messages about in-driver events will be printed.

             2   Additional debug messages will be printed when memory allocation fails.

FILES

     /dev/emu10kx?  snd_emu10kx management interface

HISTORY

     The snd_emu10kx device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 7.0.

AUTHORS

     The PCM part of the driver is based on the snd_emu10k1(4) SB Live! driver by Cameron Grant
     <cg@FreeBSD.org>.  The MIDI interface is based on the snd_emu10k1(4) MIDI interface code by
     Mathew Kanner <matk@FreeBSD.org>.  The snd_emu10kx device driver and this manual page were
     written by Yuriy Tsibizov.

BUGS

     The driver does not detect lost S/PDIF signals and produces noise when S/PDIF is not
     connected and S/PDIF volume is not zero.

     The PCM driver cannot detect the presence of Live!Drive or AudigyDrive breakout boxes and
     tries to use them (and list their connectors in the mixer).

     The MIDI driver cannot detect the presence of Live!Drive or AudigyDrive breakout boxes and
     tries to enable the IR receiver on them anyway.