Playing MP3's freezes my RH7.2 box

[epseps]

I'm playing them under my user account and the whole damn system locks up. It doesn't matter if I am playing them under xmms or the ncurses based mp3blaster.

I was even telneted in as root from another machine to see if I could find out exactly what was happening and kill the process and the keyboard on the remote machine wouldn't even echo back my keystrokes.

Anyone else experience this?

[marvin]

Annoying, Can't say that I have experienced this, but here ae some things you could try.

Can you play *.wav files (using play for instance) or get any sound out of the copmuter without locking the system? It might be some weird problem with the sound card and/or sound drivers and/or sound configuration.

Did it work before, and in that case; have you done any changes recently that might have caused this prob?

Does the system manage to write any error messages to /var/log/messages before it freezes?

Can you reconfigure your soundcard, I think there is a program called "sndconfig" or something similar to do that.

[epseps]

I'll try converting an mp3 to .wav and play that.

Nothing in /var/log/messages to hint at the cause of the crash, it just locked up everything. But I re-did sndconfig and then checked the messages again and here is a suspect line:

SB16: Bad or missing 16 bit DMA channel

I have an old ISA Soundblaster card.

This didn't happen in the other versions of Red hat I've run on this machine (6, 6.1, 7, 7.1), so it is odd.

[Toi Mak]

You likely have a resource conflict with another device. Do:

cat /proc/interrupts

and see if an IRQ is being shared. If so, you may be able to set it to an open IRQ and I/O port when loading the soundcard module like:

modulename irq=5 io=0x220

...or you could reserve an IRQ in your BIOS as Legacy ISA.

You may also have two apps trying to access the device at the same time. Do

lsof /dev/dsp

then kill the app also trying to use /dev/dsp.

[marvin]

I did a grep in the kernel source code and the error message "SB16: Bad or missing 16 bit DMA channel" is printed when the dma16 is incorrectly set or omitted.

What options do you pass to the soundblaster module? You can find the settings in /etc/modules.conf For SB16 the valid values for dma16 are 5, 6 or 7.

[ 17 March 2002: Message edited by: marvin ]

[epseps]

Originally posted by marvin:
<STRONG>I did a grep in the kernel source code and the error message "SB16: Bad or missing 16 bit DMA channel" is printed when the dma16 is incorrectly set or omitted.

What options do you pass to the soundblaster module? You can find the settings in /etc/modules.conf For SB16 the valid values for dma16 are 5, 6 or 7.

[ 17 March 2002: Message edited by: marvin ]</STRONG>

Here is my /etc/modules.conf:

alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
alias eth0 8139too
alias usb-controller usb-uhci
alias sound-slot-0 sb
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L &gt;/dev/null 2&gt;&1
|| :
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S &gt;/dev/null 2&gt;&1 |
| :
options sound dmabuf=1
alias synth0 opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb isapnp=1

I'm guessing I need to change the dmabuff to 5. Is that correct?

PS. No IRQ conflicts. (5)

[marvin]

Here is some info from the documentation included in the kernel source. (if you have it handy you could check &lt;path to source&gt;/linux/Documentation/sound/Soundblaster)


...
The Sound Blaster module takes the following arguments


io I/O address of the Sound Blaster chip (0x220,0x240,0x260,0x280)
irq IRQ of the Sound Blaster chip (5,7,9,10)
dma 8-bit DMA channel for the Sound Blaster (0,1,3)
dma16 16-bit DMA channel for SB16 and equivalent cards (5,6,7)
mpu_io I/O for MPU chip if present (0x300,0x330)

sm_games=1 Set if you have a Logitech soundman games
acer=1 Set this to detect cards in some ACER notebooks
mwave_bug=1 Set if you are trying to use this driver with mwave (see on)
type Use this to specify a specific card type

The following arguments are taken if ISAPnP support is compiled in

isapnp=0 Set this to disable ISAPnP detection (use io=0xXXX etc. above)
...


Replace this line

options sb isapnp=1

with

options sb isapnp=0 io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330

I think these are the factory default settings, change them if your card is configured differently.

Not sure if you have to add "isapnp=0" to the list or if it is implied since you have specified the hw settings.

I hope this will solve your problems

&lt;EDIT&gt;
BTW, the dmabuf option makes the sound driver use persistent DMA buffers. This option needs to be enabled (=1) if you have an ISA sound card and more than 16MB RAM.
&lt;/EDIT&gt;

[ 17 March 2002: Message edited by: marvin ]

[epseps]

It still froze, but I think I need to insmod something.

I'm gonna dmesg and see what I can can pick out.

Thanks for your help.

[marvin]

Originally posted by epseps:
<STRONG>It still froze, but I think I need to insmod something.

I'm gonna dmesg and see what I can can pick out.

Thanks for your help.</STRONG>

[list=1]
Does the system hang when you tried to play other sound files, wav, au, mid? If it did not, it might be some other problem than just the sound modules

Are the sound modules loaded when you boot? Since you probably need persistent DMA buffers, it must be loaded at boot so it can reserve some RAM below 16MB for the DMA buffers. (ISA cards cannot access RAM over 16MB)

What does lsmod show? You should have something like this.

sb 1792 1
sb_lib 32928 0 [sb]
uart401 6144 0 [sb_lib]
sound 54636 1 [sb_lib uart401]
soundcore 3620 5 [sb_lib sound]


Try to unload the sound modules
rmmod sb sb_lib uart401 sound soundcore
and reload them
modprobe sound-slot-0

Did you get any error messages in /var/log/messages or in the terminal window?
[/list=a]

If you don't have the kernel source documentation installed you can find it here
Kernel sound docs (http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/sound/).

I think Introduction (http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/sound/Introduction.html), README.modules (http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/sound/README.modules.html) and Soundblaster (http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/doc/sound/Soundblaster.html) are the most important files in this case.