Please Help with Linux sound

First post: Help with Linux sound.

After all the shenanigans regarding the windows echo-system I decided to give Linux a try. I’m more than noob, it’s my first attempt, so please be gentle :slight_smile:

I install bare metal in an old HDD, to feel the real deal without virtualization. I tried the latest Fedora but was not successful.

First thing I do in any new OS installation is to turn the desktop background to solid black.

I’m probably not intelligent enough to use Fedora OS as after more than half an hour trying to do this, I quit. It was frustrating to see 3 buttons on the background app (wallpapers/pictures/colors) without being able to change any of the presets (and none was black).

My second (and actual) try is Mint 18.1. I was able to configure all I want in minutes! Great integration… But I have a very big issue with it, and that’s why I’m asking for help. I tried google (for about 2 days of research now) and I couldn’t find a solution to my big “no-no”: the sound!

I have a creative x-fi fatal1ty for "almost a decade" LOL and I always disable the integrated sound as it is miles away in sound quality (even in my asus x99 deluxe) and the sound I get from Pulse is atrocious! As bad as the integrated sound :frowning:

I’ve been reading about using ALSA instead of Pulse, but sometimes people say Pulse is just a front-end of ALSA, others say they are independent, others say ALSA is the best, other say bla, bla… So I found a driver from Creative’s website (XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar) and was trying to see if I could get, at least, the hardware bass and treble functionality of the card, in hopes it would change the horrible, weak, lifeless sound from Pulse Equalizer (or without equalizer).

While trying to install this driver (and even before the hoops I will have to jump to change from Pulse to Alsa, but that will come later, I’m sure) it aborts, saying it can’t find the “sound/driver.h”.
I can’t see any “sound” folder in the root of the installation package, so did they forget to add a folder to the driver tar? A “sound” folder with some .h files (driver.h)?

Can some nice and knowledgeable Linux masters help me make my sound card great again?
I just want the hardware bass and treble. Pulse equalizer is too distortion prone and lifeless. I’m a kind of audiophile, if that’s even a real adjective :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance for any insights!

First and foremost, I've spent a lot of time railing against Pulse, and now that I've come around I am ashamed of my previous efforts. Pulse. Don't look back. It's not worth the time or the effort.

Next. Hop into your settings, and go to Sound. You should see something like this.

Under the Output section, let's see what you have listed. I find it hard to believe that Linux doesn't have drivers for Creative anything. I've used everything from the Audigy 2 all the way back to the Live! in recent versions of Linux. Unless the X-Fi is somehow significantly different.

Maybe let's check out the output of

lspci -k

Find your sound card, and see if there's a "Kernel driver in use" listed.

Edit:

I missed this in my initial reading. This may or may not change whether or not Pulse is better than ALSA. I don't know. I enjoy Pulse for the features it has over ALSA. I am not an audiophile. So with this in mind, it may be worth your while to investigate alternatives to Pulse. But I would highly recommend getting settled in first. Get used to how it work, and know what it's like when everything is functioning as expected. Then start breaking things.

Also, a number of years back I played with an application called veromix. If it's still a thing, maybe it would be interesting to you. I recall it made me wish I were an audio snob. It was really nice to be able to adjust the volume and even the output device on a per-application basis. Here's a screenshot.

Sounds like your saying sound works on the x-fi?

The driver for the x-fi card is already in the kernel, there is no other driver (the one your found is from before creative finally open sourced it). If its working, its working.

Thank you so much for the insight Levitance! I will keep searching for a solution to my poor audio experience in linux, and take your tips as a starting point again. Thanks a lot!

I'll be a bit disappointment if I find no one has back-engineered this card to allow it to function properly, after so many years..

You mean there's no way to use my hardware's capabilities.. Did I arrive to my first "linux issue with no solution" already?

How exactly is the sound bad?

I can only describe it as flat, bland.. like an on-board cheap chip sound. When I enable the equalizer, the bass runs to distortion before it even gets to be involving.. There's no crystal clear highs, just hiss.
I messed with the equalizer a lot (enough to know it crashes (mutes) my sound everywhere after around 30 to 40 changes, and then I must restart the computer to get sound again).

If there's a supported sound card with equal specs as mine, and no fuss to take advantage of the hardware, I would be willing to try and buy it. Software equalization is not an option for me (at least not with pulse default equalizer).
Or is there a distro that is focused to audiophiles and sound? That would be amazing :slight_smile:

Creative X-Fi sound cards just work.
There is no need to install drivers for anything but very exotic hardware in linux.
It is very well possible that your audio subsystem was broken by the attempt to install a driver. Those drivers are probably still for like linux 2.6 or something lol.

I have X-Fi cards as well, they are very well supported in linux, because the same DSP chips are also used in E-mu cards, which is kinda extraordinary of Creative to have offered DSP chips used in a profressional/audiophile platform, even though a budget one, in consumer products. Consequence is that Linux has the built-in tools to reprogram the DSP and control every single bit of it. That also means that you have the power to make it go haywire. If you use DSP development tools and write to the chip, you can even kill it.

If you're looking for an audio centric distro, there is a lot of choice, but the fact of the matter is that nobody uses the audio centric distros, but rather enable the repos of those distros to grab the interesting packages to use in their distro of choice. Unless you're an actual musician, and would need the extra 1-2 ms of latency reduction by running an optimized kernel with pseudo-RT settings, or even - if you're running it on dedicated commercial hardware for instance, like a computerized mixer or recording console - a true RT kernel.

The most popular audio centric repos are those by KxStudio. It is advisable to use a Qt based DE for that. Gtk doesn't play nice with non-gtk apps. Qt does play nice with gtk apps though, so you're not missing out when you opt for a Qt based DE in terms of gtk apps that you might like. But the other way around is just misery.

Install a high quality distro of your choice (not Mint and not Ubuntu 17.04), preferably something with modern kernel support like Manjaro (all preconfigured including codecs and based on Arch Linux) or Fedora (comes without some codecs, e.g. mp3 recording, but with mp3 playback support, and most open source formats also of coutrse, flac, ogg, wav, everything is there, and if you need something extra, it's easy to install from community repos). Important is that these distros are bleeding edge, they are on kernel 4.10, so you'll get modern hardware support and many performance improvements, security improvements and extended functionality. Running an old kernel can be very useful for servers or some mission critical machines, but usually, for desktop use, especially with the number of kernel improvements of the last two years, you would want to run a very new kernel.

OMG! Thank you so much for your time!.. but you completely lost me.. So many words but Nothing I can understand.
Nothing I can use, no terminal commands, no nothing that could help..
Did you read my first post? This is my FIRST time with Linux!, I'm an idiot and I am crap with linux! Getting away from windows is worst than I thought - according to you.

The sound experience I get from my hardware, between Mint linux with Pulse (with or without equalizer) and windows is million miles away.
I really don't care about latency. It could be 10 seconds and I wouldn't care, as long as it sounds right :slight_smile:
What is QE and DE and all those things you talk about? Will it improve my experience? What are the commands/clicks I have to do?

So, Mint is useless and I should delete everything I did and install Manjaro.
I can do that, my installation of Linux is 4 days old :slight_smile:
I tried fedora first. It was unusable. I took half an hour to try to change the background to black, and I couldn't, so I went to the next "flavor", Mint, by no order.

Can you tell me how to change Fedoraś latest distro desktop background to black (without creating a black picture) LOL

What Real answer could you give me, to take advantage of a sound card hardware in linux, whatever it may be (Creative, asus, [you name it]).. I will buy that card and I want hardware access for what I'm paying - and specially the clean sound reward!

Sorry, I really didn't understand most of what you said (but I'm thankful) ...so many words for no help at all...

Fortunately, you're running into this problem right out the gate. I say fortunately because once you get past it, you're probably going to love everything else in Linux. Take it from someone who has recorded entire songs on Linux, audio is by far and large Linux's weakest link. Always has been and still is.

PulseAudio is a layer on top of ALSA, so a little bit more than a front-end. It was meant to make audio simple for average desktop users and it does that well but, as you are experiencing, it give audiophiles fits.

The first troubleshooting step I would take in your situation would be download some Live CDs of other distros (just about every one but Gentoo uses pulse by default) and see if the problem is present there, too. No need to install, just grab something, boot it from a USB drive, and make some noise. That will rule out if it's a distro issue.

Next, what version of PulseAudio are you running? It's improved greatly with subsequent versions. I'm not sure what version Mint is shipping, but it might be worth trying to upgrade PulseAudio. Have you run package updates since installing?

You mentioned a distorted sound. For whatever reason, pulse lets you set your volume over 100%, which obviously would cause that. There's a tool called pavucontrol (pavuctl?). Try installing it and checking all of your volumes. Something might be set over 100%.

Stay away from Creative's drivers! Stick with the version your distro packaged. Creative's drivers are a bit like nvidia's. It's as if they tried to make them break systems. The package maintainers for distros go to great lengths to correct this before pushing out the packaged drivers.

As far as comparable cards, when I read about the Creative drivers issue I decided I didn't want to fool with that and went for an Asus Xonar in my mother's computer. It has worked flawlessly.

Keep with it! You're about to tackle the biggest hurdle.

So you want to listen to music, and be able to use the DSP widening and Crystallizer like Creative offers, but without having to wait for ages until Creatives control panel in Windows loads lol...

Easy. Install Fedora 25 Desktop edition (with Gnome).

Then install Audacious music player:

su -c 'dnf install audacious'

Then go into the Audacious settings, chose upsampling to 96 kHz, enable crystallizer and if you were using the Creative 3D, that's the stereo widening or the binaural settings, both use the same kind of functionality. The standard drivers make it work over the Creative DSP.

Tip:

  • set the crystallizer in Audacious to like 0.8 or so.
  • I wouldn't use widening or binaural conversion
  • the linux audio subsystem is much much much better than Windows'. You'll be amazed at the sound quality out of the box, and even more amazed if you use upsampling. The upsampling is also done without bogging down your system.

Is that practical?

Hey man, thank you for reply! You are superman!
As I installed everything from the newest versions 4 days ago, and run ALL updates every day since, I can surely say All my software is up-to-date as of now :slight_smile:

I can feel that Zoltan is a linux fanboy that prefers to confuse people rather than to admit that Linux is lacking in the sound area eh, eh.. I understand :slight_smile:

My main point is: Is linux ready for me or not? The answers I'm getting are contradicting: Fanboys say it's all my fault (but they don't tell me how to solve the problem) and you and other people tell me "Yes, there's an actual elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge".
Thank you for that!

Can someone please lead me to some real improvement?? Like what hardware/software/distro/whatever that will give me the same sound experience I have with my old sound card in Windowzz? If it is hardware, I could buy it. I just want to see if I can get the full experience I have in windows, but with linux...
Simple task?

Hmm.. I thought I said Fedora is not viable. I wasted almost an hour of my time to try changing it's desktop background to solid black and I couldn't, so I assumed I am not intelligent enough to have this OS as my daily driver.

Btw: How do you do that in the latest version, anyway? :slight_smile:

Fine, any other distro with Gnome will do just fine. The problem of changing a background is not distro-dependent, it's DE dependent. You could also use Cinnamon or Unity, or any other distro. The reason I suggested Gnome is because it's lighter in terms of dependencies to install Audacious on in comparison to a Qt based desktop.

You're being a tad offensive also to be honest. I understand that you're stressed out over the unknown, but you can actually get professional help for linux also, against payment, like you would otherwise pay Microsoft. Then you wouldn't have to read up on a few things. On the other hand, you could spend some time reading through this forum, and learn everything there is to know in a day of fun reading and interacting with the people here.

Linux is used in professional audio studios, I know that very well because I actually run one. It's used for professional recording, overdubbing and syncing of educational and commercial materials, mostly speech, but also music. The top music recording solutions in the world all run on linux. If you would have read through the forum, you would have known that the lowest latencies and highest fidelity can be found on the linux platform, linux holds all records in terms of latency and fidelity in audio applications.

Seriously though, read up on the minimum, and don't use it like Windows, don't download nothing, don't install third party drivers, just stick with the programme, and you'll be just fine. A week from now, you'll enjoy it like you've never enjoyed computing in your life. It's just the bad habits of Windows that you have to grow out of lol.

Desktop Background change in Gnome (e.g. Fedora)... right click the desktop, add picture of your choice (black if you want) to the desktop backgrounds pool in the background settings dialogue, done.

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Sorry, I'm a bit frustrated, you can tell, but not so much as aggressive :slight_smile:
Still you didn't tell me how to change the newest Fedora background to black: you have 3 choices - wallpaper/pictures/color but no black color :frowning:

I believe you when you say Linux is used in professional audio settings. Actually, I want to believe it, so please tell me how to setup my rig in a way I can listen to Dvorak with the same warmth in Linux as in windowz. Sudo commands, hardware, whatever, just help me on my first incursion to linux and try to make it easy :slight_smile:

What commands, installations, hardware, sudo's, please tell me :slight_smile:

Do you mean I need to create a black picture to turn my desktop black? Not a solid color? Are you kidding me? LOL
Sorry, still not being offensive, just realistic..

I don't use Fedora. I thought for sure your were just overlooking something, but I fired it up in a virtual machine and saw indeed it only gives you a dozen preset colors. Goodness, now I see why people make fun of Fedora and Gnome 3 so much.

Anyway... as with all things Linux, it can still be done manually.

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Type: sudo dnf install dconf-editor
  3. Then type: dconf-editor
  4. Navigate to org/gnome/desktop/background
  5. Change primary-color and secondary-color to #000000

That should do it. Why the Fedora folks didn't just put it in the UI is beyond me.

Wish I could, but I don't have an X-Fi to test with (Not handy at least. I'll see if one of my friends has one). Like I said, the Asus Xonar is rock solid on Linux.

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And these are? Not calling your bluff but I'd sure like to know what they are.

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herbmillerjr, you are the man!! It's people like you that makes me believe mankind still has a chance. Thank you so much for all your help and effort!

Contrary to other people here - that just vomit pages of useless information to show-off their "linux kung-fu" to the friends, when the issue is "too much sand for their truck" (Portuguese saying)

What distro would you recommend me to try? I'm on Mint, but "someone" already told me to delete everything and install a proper distro based on Arch - I would like to stress that this is my FIRST time with linux.

Fedora was out of the equation because of the background issue, but if you think it's a better distro, I'll give it a go (now that I know how to change it to black, thanks to you).
The audio issue will come after I properly install the right distro and configure it.

I'm considering getting an asus xonar and use the x-fi just for windoz. If that will bring my quality audio capabilities to linux, I'm up to try it! (Sorry for my English, I'm Portuguese)

Thank you again, my friend!

I think he was just trying to impress the friends, instead of trying to help with the issue. I don't even understand why he posted in this thread..

This type of "I know it all and you are a noob idiot" kind of attitude is what makes people like me afraid of trying linux. And God forbid having an issue eh, eh, let the humiliation begin!... :slight_smile: