Friday, June 6. 2003
One of those little details that I hated after switching my primary box from Windows to Linux was problems I had with my SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 card (with the LiveDrive2). The big issue for me was that I like to wear earphones when listening to music while I'm coding, writing, whatever and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to make it work in Linux. I had normal speaker output just fine, but the earphone jack in my LiveDrive just refused to cooperate.
Unfortunately, there isn't too many resources for those who are trying to get the drivers (emu10k1) working properly... But, thanks to some guys (banshee in particular) in #creative @ Freenode.net I finally figured out how to get my earphones working!
The trick is the emu-dspmgr application which allows you to route sound in and out of different interfaces the card supports.. In my case, it ended up just being as simple as the following:
[user@localhost]# emu-dspmgr -a"Pcm L: Phones L"
[user@localhost]# emu-dspmgr -a"Pcm R: Phones R"
There is a README-TOOLS file in the docs/ dir of the emu10k1 source which lays out all the inputs/outputs you can route.. in this case I'm routing the Pcm channels (which come from things like XMMS, etc) into the Phones output channels..
Hopefully this will be picked up @ google and others will save themselves a lot of headaches.