Getting Sound blaster live to work with skype in Linux

Ok, from my last blog, I have gotten WarCraft III to run in linux & everything was fine. However, during some intensive game play, with some prolonged sound of the battle horn or repeated sounds from a spinning crusher machines, these sound will hang my 8 years old Yamaha YMF724 sound card.

As from my other ealier posts, RealPlayer cannot work with my nVidia HD audio chip using the ALSA driver. And that still does not work with the latest 10.0.8 version of RealPlayer released in Aug 2006 still. Quite a major disappointment I must say.

So, I have gotten a second hand SB Live 5.1 sound card, thinking that it should be old enough for RealPlayer to recognised it & play correctly without hanging my desktop again. So it did. But I was met with another more silly problem that the SB Live 5.1 simply won't record my voice in Skype. And that works flawlessly with both my onboard nVidia sound or the Yamaha YMF724 PCI card.

After some major search on the net, the solution was simply adding 'AC97' in the "Volume Control" tap & make sure it's not muted. Now, everthing goes. No more hanging of WC3 during intensive game play or with prolonged sound of battle horn or repeated sounds. And skype works also.

But to think even the most established sound card manufacturers hardware has such nifty gritty glitches with linux. I am really disappointed.