A problem with sound in Linux

[Alejandro Diaz Infante]

On Sunday 10 November 2002 19:22, Scott Rossi wrote:
> > I've been noticing that in a good number of soundcards (including mine, a
> > SB Live! with OSS driver), using "play somesound.au" or "play audioclip
> > somesound.au" results a garbled audio output. There's nothing wrong with
> > the audio files, and I can even play them perfectly in a console or
> > terminal emulator, using "xanim somesound.au" or "play somesound.au". If
> > I use the wav format, I got the same result.
> >
> > Curiously, the only way I had found to play correctly those files in
> > MetaCard is using something like "start player somesound".
> >
> > Does somebody know why the play command does not work well in MetaCard
> > with some soundcards, even though 'xanim' is up and running? Is there a
> > way to solve it without having to create a player for each audio file?
>
> You might try checking the sample rates of the problem files.  MC's
> built-in playback favors "standard" sampling rates of 11k, 22k and 44k, at
> 8 and 16 bits.  Also, playback seems to be even more finicky when it comes
> to .au formatted sounds.  I don't have any specific recipes for problems,
> but apparently it is "unusual" to have a 16 bit, 22k .au file, and MC will
> often not be able to handle it.
>

Thank you.

I have the sound files in "standard" sampling rates. The au files are 11Hz, 8 
bits, the wav files (which are not part of my program, used just for testing) 
are 22Hz, 16 bits. 'play' output is a garbled sound in both cases.

> The reason a player can handle these sounds is because (as I understand it)
> player objects hand off playback to the multimedia resources of the host
> system (QuickTime, Window Media Player, etc) and these technologies are
> much more forgiving of varying sampling rates/bit depths.
>

Ummmh. I had seen the 'play' problem only in some soundcards (there are others 
that handle those sound files very well). How could we know the source of the 
problem? is it the way metacard handle sound? 

> Regards,
>
> Scott Rossi
> Creative Director
>
> Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
> Email: scott at tactilemedia.com
> Web: www.tactilemedia.com
>
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