Well, I figured out that the culprit to my xrun problem wasn't my 533mghz processor, its my envy24 chipset based card, from the alsa wiki: "Many but not all users complain about sound glitches. This may be due to the cards being IRQ hungry. (VU meter interface?) -- Tobiah" Given that the evil envy24 chip is in a lot of cards out there, I'm wondering what cards people have had better results with? http://www.brianredfern.org

Well, I figured out that the culprit to my xrun problem wasn't my 533mghz processor, its my envy24 chipset based card, from the alsa wiki: "Many but not all users complain about sound glitches. This may be due to the cards being IRQ hungry. (VU meter interface?) -- Tobiah" Given that the evil envy24 chip is in a lot of cards out there, I'm wondering what cards people have had better results with? http://www.brianredfern.org

Anthony, It could be a huge number of things, but like you I doubt it's just interrupts. As you say, no card is going to generate more interrupts than it needs to. Some cards could require a few more interrupts to get the job done, but I doubt they'll generate that many more interrupts. More likely is the quality of the DMA controller in the sound chip, and how well it gets the data across the bus. If a card has to deliver 1024 bytes, and can do that in one burst of 256 cycles, while another card delivers the same 1024 bytes in 8 bursts of 128 bytes, the first card will be much more efficient and better behaved in the system, and probably use less PCI time doing it. This is also HEAVILY driven by what the chipset will allow a PCI device to so, hence my RME and your RME cards, while identical, might give different performance results because our PC chipsets give it different access to system resources like memory. To answer Brian's original question, I don't think Jack yet supports 96K, but the RME cards do, and they work pretty nicely. Unfortunately they are not inexpensive... One thing I hope Brian understand is that not every xrun is caused by the sound card. Many (IMO most!) xruns are potentially caused by the disk subsystem. Study that machine carefully Brian! With best regards, Mark -----Original Message----- From: linux-audio-user-admin(a)music.columbia.edu [mailto:linux-audio-user-admin@music.columbia.edu]On Behalf Of Anthony Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 2:15 PM To: linux-audio-user(a)music.columbia.edu Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] 24bit 96khz cards that work well * Brian Redfern <bredfern(a)calarts.edu> [Dec 30 02 14:03]: Also, out of interest, what does IRQ hungry mean? Isn't the frequency of interrupts determined by HW parameters you choose? How can there be any 'extra' interrupts. You mentioned in an earlier thread that your SB card didnt seem so interrupt hungry, but are you sure the device is opened with the same params? I'm no expert. Can anyone explain this? --ant

Anthony, It could be a huge number of things, but like you I doubt it's just interrupts. As you say, no card is going to generate more interrupts than it needs to. Some cards could require a few more interrupts to get the job done, but I doubt they'll generate that many more interrupts. More likely is the quality of the DMA controller in the sound chip, and how well it gets the data across the bus. If a card has to deliver 1024 bytes, and can do that in one burst of 256 cycles, while another card delivers the same 1024 bytes in 8 bursts of 128 bytes, the first card will be much more efficient and better behaved in the system, and probably use less PCI time doing it. This is also HEAVILY driven by what the chipset will allow a PCI device to so, hence my RME and your RME cards, while identical, might give different performance results because our PC chipsets give it different access to system resources like memory. To answer Brian's original question, I don't think Jack yet supports 96K, but the RME cards do, and they work pretty nicely. Unfortunately they are not inexpensive... One thing I hope Brian understand is that not every xrun is caused by the sound card. Many (IMO most!) xruns are potentially caused by the disk subsystem. Study that machine carefully Brian! With best regards, Mark -----Original Message----- From: linux-audio-user-admin(a)music.columbia.edu [mailto:linux-audio-user-admin@music.columbia.edu]On Behalf Of Anthony Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 2:15 PM To: linux-audio-user(a)music.columbia.edu Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] 24bit 96khz cards that work well * Brian Redfern <bredfern(a)calarts.edu> [Dec 30 02 14:03]: Also, out of interest, what does IRQ hungry mean? Isn't the frequency of interrupts determined by HW parameters you choose? How can there be any 'extra' interrupts. You mentioned in an earlier thread that your SB card didnt seem so interrupt hungry, but are you sure the device is opened with the same params? I'm no expert. Can anyone explain this? --ant

No, I think perhaps "irq hungry" is a meaningless statement, rather there's a nasty fight for resources between my AGP Rage card and the Audiophile, I'm testing this simply by running Jack, and watching the reports of xruns, the sblive is popping an xruns every twenty minutes, and then the xrun is tiny like .009 miliseconds, while the Audiophile was popping a 54 milisecond xrun every two seconds. The whole "irg hungry" thing is perhaps a misnomer.

Mark, JACK supports 96KHz.

Brian, I originally had an ATI Rage card and had to take it out because it conflicted with my MOBO. The damn thing wouldn't even boot. I switched to an NVIDIA card and that straightened it out. I listened to some of your music. What kind of gear/software are you using to do that? I've never done anything with synthesizers so I'm completely clueless about that stuff. Jan http://www.mp3.com/bluesbakers On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 17:59, Brian Redfern wrote:

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 15:55, Jan "Evil Twin" Depner wrote: Cool! I didn't know that support for that was there yet. Thanks!