A Dual Sound Card Setup

kwong — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:15:07 +0000

Newer sound card usually does not come with a game port since most of the peripherals nowadays come almost exclusively with USB connections.Since I have an old MIDI keyboard (MK-4903) and the only way it can connect to a computer is via the game port, I could not use it on my either of my Linux workstations (1, 2) at home. My main working station uses an ASUS P5E motherboard, which uses an add-on PCI Express sound card and the other Linux box uses an ASUS P5QL Pro motherboard with integrated sound. In theory, I could just disable the default sound on either of the machines and use a game port equipped sound card instead. But the only spare sound card I have is a SoundBlaster Live value card which does not offer much beyond the basics, so I decided to try adding it as a second sound card to my main computer.

Ubuntu 8.04 recognized the second sound card with no problem. A cat /dev/sndstat confirmed that both sound cards are indeed installed:

Card config:
HDA Intel at 0xf9ff8000 irq 22
SBLive! Value [CT4780] (rev.7, serial:0×80221102) at 0xe880, irq 18

And lsmod | grep snd showed that midi modules were successfully loaded:

snd_rtctimer, snd_emux_synth, snd_seq_virmidi, snd_emu10k1, snd_ac97_codec, snd_seq_dummy, snd_seq_oss, snd_hda_intel, snd_pcm_oss, snd_mixer_oss, snd_pcm, snd_rawmidi, snd_hwdep, snd_seq, snd_timer, snd_seq_device

So the dual sound card setup is pretty effortless. Getting the MIDI keyboard setup correctly though turned out to be quite tricky and I will share my experience in a later post.

Kerry D. Wong » MIDI keyboard

A Dual Sound Card Setup