If you now hear a beep coming from your external speakers, you have a working sound card. If the beep comes from the internal beeper/speaker, your soundcard is not working with BeOS. Of course, the latter case only means it is currently not working, not that you cannot get it to work by using a 3rd party driver or some such.

Be’s Jon Wätte adds:

To see whether your sound card is supposed to work under version R4 of BeOS, all you have to do is open up a Terminal, and type:

 ls -l /dev/audio/old 

If some name like “awe64″ or “cs4226″ or “sonic_vibes” or “ymf714″ shows up, your sound card is recognized and should be making sound. If it’s not, you may not have a Beep or Startup sound configured in the Sounds preferences panel: open that panel and choose some sounds and you should be all set.

If you still cannot hear anything, open the Media preference panel, Audio section, and make sure to uncheck all “Mute” checkboxes in “Output” and “Mixer” that may be active.

Of course, the best test is to read the hardware compatibility list found on the Be web site.

Bjoern Wilmsmann (wilmsmann@pwx-webhosting.de) adds:

If your supported soundcard is not working under BeOS, check for resource conflicts in the Devices preferences panel and set it to another IRQ, or put the card in P&P mode (either via jumpers or the BIOS).

But unbeknownst to many, BeOS also includes a command-line CD player and ripper that works from the shell. To learn its usage, just type

play

without any arguments. The command will report the path to your raw CD device, along with all allowable arguments and parameters. You’ll see something like this:

home>play
Usage:  play device [command [param]]

 Valid devices:
   /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw

 Valid commands:
   0 [n] - play from track n [1]
   1     - pause
   2     - resume
   3     - stop
   4     - eject
   5 n   - set volume to n (0 <= n <= 255)
   6     - current position
   7 n s - save track n to file s
   8 [c] - scan in direction c (f = forward, b = backward)

So to play track 7 on this system, you would type:

play /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw 0 7

because 0 means play, and 7 is the track number, fed to play as an argument. Of course you’ll need to change the path to the CD device to reflect your own system. To save track 7 to disk as raw audio, use something like:

play /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw 7 7 ~/data/sounds/filename.raw

Obviously, it would be a simple matter to write a script that would take the number of tracks on a CD as an argument, and rip the whole thing to disk.

There is already another playlist which you made directly with Soundplay (or CL-Amp) in that directory which is named sample. But in /musik/mp3/ there are a lot of mp3’s and you really don’t want to add them all by hand.

Then you just have to open a Terminal and type cd Desktop/playlists and

then:

find /musik/mp3/ -name *MP3 -print > allmp3s
copyattr sample allmp3s

There you go. You will have a working playlist of all the mp3’s in the directory. Be sure and use the full absolute path to your MP3 directory, or you may end up with relative paths in your playlists (which won’t work).

You could also do the find differently and only put the files that have jazz in their name in a playlist. So if you named all your jazz files jazz_someone.MP3 then you would use:

find /musik/mp3/ -name jazz*MP3 -print > jazz
copyattr allmp3s jazz

You can of course also change the directory and only put the files from /musik/mp3/rock in the playlist by typing:

find /musik/mp3/rock/ -name *MP3 -print > rock
copyattr allmp3s rock

I think you got the general idea. Just make sure that you made one playlist with Soundplay so you get the attributes right with copyattr and remember that the searches are case sensitive.

The reason for the noise is that the Be guys love it loud and therefore they crank up the output gain to 4x. Now with the amplified output (at least my amplified output) it makes A LOT of noise which I don’t enjoy. Since there is no ‘normal’ way of getting it down to 1x I decided to tell you how to fix it. It’s not perfect, but hey don’t blame me I didn’t cause it. In fact don’t blame me if you don’t know what you’re doing and something goes wrong. I take no responsability for this ‘hack’ and what happens to your system.

What this ‘hack’ does:
What it does is simply write to the soundcards mixer register and turn it down to 1x. It’s only four basic operations so I decided to write a script since this code should have been in the driver anyway. Here it is.

Solution:
This assumes that your awe64 is installed (and working!!!) at 0×220. (You can check this with the Devices preferences panel). If it’s installed in another way you take the two first numbers (in this case 22) and replace the 22’s later in this example.

1. In your ‘UserBootscript’-file located in ‘/boot/home/config/boot’ add the following line first:
poke </boot/home/CorrectSound >/dev/null

2. Use an texteditor (StyledEdit maybe) and write the following:
outb 0x224 0x41 outb 0x225 0x0 outb 0x224 0x42 outb 0x225 0x0 quit

3. Save the texteditor file to /boot/home/CorrectSound

4. Open a Terminal and type: poke </boot/home/CorrectSound

It’s done. And once you restart you will have about 2 seconds of noise at start-up (I told you it wasn’t perfect). Now, start sending me money :).

Open up a terminal window and use the “play” program (as described in the tip Rip CDs from the command line).

So to start playing a CD you would type:

play (your device) 0 (track number to start at)

Just typing play with no arguments will tell you which devices are valid.

Alternatively, you can play CDs without an audio driver if you start them from within Windows:

Fortunately, the 32 is supported by the SB16 driver. Download the SB16 driver from BeWare and you’ll be all set — you’ll even get MIDI support (which the SB16 doesn’t do).

Note that if you enter track names for your CDs, all track names and playing times will be remembered as well!

In addition, if you should happen to purchase a PCI version rather than ISA, note that you’ll be getting a different chipset entirely, and will need to download the Ensoniq es1370 or Ensoniq es1371 driver. (link not working, waiting for update).

First of all, you’ll need to use an ID3 tag manipulator that extracts tag info and writes it to attributes. Jonas Sundstrom’s Tag2Attr and Attr2Tag add- ons are excellent, as is his TagWorld editor. When you first install one of these, you’ll need to manually add Title, Artist, Album, Year, and Comment attributes to your MP3 file type. In this process, you will have given each attribute an internal name, such as Audio:Year. In order to run this query, the attributes you want to search on will need to be indexed by the system, so open a Terminal and type:

mkindex Audio:Year

for example. You only need to do this once. Remember that newly created indexes don’t index pre-existing data, so if you’ve already added a year attribute to tons of MP3 files, you’ll want to copy your MP3 folder to another location and then delete the original. This will cause all of your MP3 files’ Audio:Year attributes to be added to the index. If you’ve only got a few of them, just add the year attributes anew.

To test whether you’ve done all of this properly, run a normal Attribute query to find all of your MP3 files that were made in 1971. If the query is successful, all you have to do is launch a blank playlist editor in your MP3 player, select all in the query results window, drag the selection to the playlist window, and save.

Of course, these principles can easily be extended to do just about anything. For example, you could find all Neil Sedaka songs anywhere on your system with a comment field including the phrase “delicious,” or whatever you want.

Remember: If you store your MP3 volumes on a separate volume, you must index each volume you intend to query.