# Kernel 2.6.31, Creative X-fi, static

## anuraaga

Hello,

I've been trying out the snd-ctxfi module included in kernel 2.6.31 since a few RCs back, and there has always been an issue with it where sound is played with a large amount of static which makes the module unusable.  The static isn't there the entire time, it's just when sound is played it's very low quality with lots of static in it. The old, ctxfi driver (included in the xfi-drivers package) has worked fine, so I went back to using it (after modifying the source a bit so it'd compile on 2.6.30+), but now that 2.6.31 is officially here, I'd like to see if it's possible to move to the kernel tree (and therefore open source ALSA) version.  Anyone else have a problem with static using snd-ctxfi?  Scanning around the net, it seems that most people seem to be having no problems with it...  One strange effect I noticed is when using alsamixer, the sound was affected by the settings for every channel.  Despite only having a set of stereo speakers plugged into the card, reducing Front volume would lower the sound output, reducing center volume would lower it, reducing surround volume would lower it, essentially it seemed that sound was always the minimum of any of these three bars, despite only having speakers hooked up to the front.

If anyone has any insight, it'd be appreciated.

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## PaulBredbury

Static in which app? Be specific.

Here's a fix for static in SDL.

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## anuraaga

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

It's happening in all applications as far as I can tell.  I normally use Pulseaudio and the same crackled sound came out of mplayer (native pulse), rhythmbox (gstreamer pulse), and flash (alsa pulse).  I also just tried every app directly through alsa after killing pulseaudio, and the same symptoms occurred, so I believe the problem lies at an ALSA/driver level. 

However, one thing I just realized that is probably related is when alsasound starts up, it gives a message:

```

alsasound          |Unknown hardware: "SB-XFi" "20K1" "" "0x1102" "0x1003"

alsasound          |Hardware is initialized using a guess method

```

Perhaps the product/vendor ID for the X-fi in this Dell is a custom edition and the driver isn't providing accurate parameters?

Edit: Checked lspci and the Xfi's vendor and device id are the correct 1102:0005, which is expected considering the module is loaded by udev.  Subsequently restarting alsasound to try to reproduce the above error message again to see what's going on produced no error message this time... no idea why the above showed up earlier in my testing, there should be no difference in the conditions then and now.  Sound still crackled as before though.

Edit: Tried an Ubuntu Karmic liveusb, which has kernel 2.6.31, and the symptoms were the same, so submitted a bug report upstream to alsa at https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=4736

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