*BSD News Article 49824


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From: mike.long@analog.com (Mike Long)
Subject: Re: What sound cards and file formats does NetBSD/i386 support?
In-Reply-To: benco@ucsee.EECS.Berkeley.EDU's message of 23 Aug 1995 22:09:47
	-0400
Message-ID: <MIKE.LONG.95Aug24182214@cthulhu.analog.com>
Lines: 30
Sender: usenet@analog.com (News pseudo-user usenet)
Reply-To: Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com>
Organization: Analog Devices CPD
References: <41gn1b$bin@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 1995 22:22:14 GMT

In article <41gn1b$bin@agate.berkeley.edu>
benco@ucsee.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Ben Cottrell) writes:

>First question: If I cat something to /dev/audio, what file formats
>can it be in? Are AIFF, AIFC, and .au supported? How about .au files
>at sampling rates other than 8 KHz?

By default, /dev/audio expects U-law data sampled at 8 kHz.
/dev/sound expects (not so sure here) 16-bit linear data at 44.1 kHz.

Both /dev/audio and /dev/sound expect raw audio data in the expected
format.  You can cat .au files to the device because most .au files
are raw U-law data with a ~32 bytes of header prepended.  You hear a
crackle at the beginning as the header bytes go by, then you hear the
sound from the file.  You need to write a player program for anything
more extensive than that.

>Second question: The HARDWARE file for i386 mentioned that it has a
>driver for the SoundBlaster. If I'm correct, the original SoundBlaster
>wasn't very good in terms of bits per frame and sampling rate... does
>this driver also support cards that use the SoundBlaster interface,
>but are 16 bit, 44.1 KHz, stereo? I was thinking in particular of the
>Gravis UltraSound card...

-current now has a GUS driver.
-- 
Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com>           http://www.shore.net/~mikel
VLSI Design Engineer         finger mikel@shore.net for PGP public key
Analog Devices, CPD Division          CCBF225E7D3F7ECB2C8F7ABB15D9BE7B
Norwood, MA 02062 USA                assert(*this!=opinionof(Analog));