Broken alsa driver snd_fm801?

[csprekelsen]

I am currently running Debian testing with pulseaudio 0.9.19 and a Formtemedia FM801 sound card. Sound is crackling. I have been playing with different configuration parameters and sampling methonds, and I only manaed to reduce the CPU consumption, but sound is still unintelligible. The only thing I guess it is happening is that the ALSA driver to be broken.

I have followed the alsa-time-test instructions and a log file has been generated. Surprisingly no so huge, but only a few Kb.It has hitted an assertion quickly:

alsa-time-test: alsa-time-test.c:43: main: Assertion `r == 0' failed.

The card is a Fortemedia according to lspci:

00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Fortemedia, Inc Xwave QS3000A [FM801] (rev b2)

and the current driver is snd_fm801.

[csprekelsen]

output of command 'alsa-time-test hw:0 > log'

[lennart]

What happens if you pass "tsched=0" to module-udev-detect? Does that make things work for you?

[csprekelsen]

With the option "tsched=0" the sound does not crack, but a background noise is distorting the sound. It looks like there is a noisy source that adds the noise signal to the played files. I keep playing with paamenters, If I find the right configuration I will let you know.

[csprekelsen]

It's solved. Playing with the PCM volume of Kmix the noise dissapeared.

Thanks for your help.

[coling]

Out of curiosity, can you check if you have only "mmx" and "sse" in the output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo" in the flags section? (specifically I'd like to know if you do not have sse2 or other sse* flags).

If this is the case, then you are perhaps having the problem documented here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.pulseaudio.general/4976

I've had people report to me that playing with the sliders was able to "solve" the problem, but it's not really a solution and it will come back. It's probably worth you checking :)