poor sound quality

[Cameron Matheson]

Binary package hint: zsnes

My sound works great normally (volume, clarity, etc. is all good). But when playing some games (specifically zsnes and quake2), the sound becomes very static-y. It seems to be an SDL/alsa issue (although that is wild speculation).

[Rodrigo Varella Rahmi (rovarella)]

I also report this here, and this make my games simply very bad in pentium 3 750 MHz. I use snes9x instead.

[Rodrigo Varella Rahmi (rovarella)]

Switch to env SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp help this, probably is an bug related to alsa code in zsnes or sdl.

[Artemis3 (artemis3)]

Test recent version: http://www.madman2k.net/files/zsnes_1.500-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

[Fibonacci (fibonacci-prower)]

The recent version does not help with sound quality. SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp (or esd, for that matter) only makes matters worse - there's no sound at all.

[\m/ike (trusatori-deactivatedaccount)]

Been experiencing this as well along with many. A work-around that has worked wonders for me is to install "alsa-oss" from the repos (sudo apt-get install alsa-oss) and setting the sound sample rate to 48000hz in zsnes (config->sound). Crystal clear sound and no adverse performance. I don't understand exactly why this works as I thought that alsa-oss has to be invoked directly (aoss <cmd> in a terminal) to wrap an app, but it works none the less. I've also read that compiling zsnes with libao enabled will also work, but I have not tested this personally.

[kindofabuzz (kindofabuzz)]

installing alsa-oss fixed the sound quality for me.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Not a bug in zsnes but in the kernel (sound) driver and the hardware, thus making it fairly difficult to resolve in any release prior to 8.04.