I’m a Whiny Little Bastard
It’s been awhile since I last posted, especially a post of computer nature.
I’ve been so bored for the past week because I HAVE NO MUSIC! My laptop’s internal sound card is seriously b0rk3d. This brought me to a strange dilemma*. I had to get a new sound card. Searching the Inter web, I found a number of cards that would fit the bill. Most of them were PCMCIA, but the lowest cost I could find (retail) for these was around $50 (or $49.95 w/e).
Now, how many people would want to pay $50 just to listen to music? Surprisingly enough, you can find USB external sound cards for about half the price, if you look carefully. Of course there are benefits and [whatever the word for the opposite of benefits is] to this. On the plus side, you can plug this into any computer and have sound. Most computers already _have_ sound cards, either on the motherboard or in a PCI slot, or connected to the modem…but that’s besides the point. On the downside, especially when it comes to laptops, is that it’s on extra thing to lug around.
The particular card I ordered is a GWC USB 5.1 Channel Audo Adapter AA1500 from Newegg (a highly respectable company, IMO), and should arrive by Monday. I had ordered 3-day shipping, but according to Tak on #slug.fl UPS doesn’t deliver on weekends.
There are also some quirks about using this card under Linux; it’s apparently difficult to configure if you have an on-board sound card installed, and it’s difficult (perhaps impossible?) to get 5.1 surround sound working, due to incompatibility and proprietary drivers. One or more of these issues may have been addressed in recent versions of the Linux kernel.
So, due to lack of music, I’m grumpy and whiny right now, thank you very much.
*On a completely unrelated side-note, the spelling of the word “dilemma” has really been bothering me. Has anyone else learned it as “dilemna?” If so, a simple Google search will prove you wrong.
2 Responses to “I’m a Whiny Little Bastard”
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April 23rd, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Did you ever get this sound card working? If so, sis you get 5.1 going as well?
UsingApril 24th, 2007 at 10:37 am
@Dave,
Actually, yes I did get the sound card working, but I can only get mono sound from it unfortunately. I’ve since built a music server that handles all of my music, but I still use the GWC to watch flash videos, etc., in which case I’m not particular about the quality of the sound.
To get the sound working with mono sound, depending on your distribution, it’s usually as simple as stopping ALSA and running `modprobe snd-usb-audio`.
Some distributions will allow you to set snd-usb-audio as your main ALSA driver (check your distro’s documentation), but I’ve noticed alsaconf tends to have problems detecting the USB sound.
Using