CS4299

CS4299 This is a Cirrus Logic AC'97 Audio controller This chip is sometimes incorrectly called CS4229 in IBM documentation Features Chipset: CS4299 Interface: AC'97 2.1 Other Information This soundcard is cheap pile of absolute rubbish. The sound quality is poor. Worst of all, it is incapable of playing multiple PCM streams or hardware mixing. To get around this, you need to set up dmix in ALSA. This may sound simple, but it is not; there is very little documentation on the subject and there can be a multitude of other problems to overcome. Also, you will need to manually configure every application to use dmix, and all OSS-only applications will have to have their commands aliased (or similar) so that they use the aoss compatibility wrapper. If anyone can provide more information on the configuration of all this then please add it. Sorry about the bad news to any who owns a ThinkPad with one of these cards. If you are considering buying a ThinkPad with one of these then please take this into account when making your decision. I upgraded from a T20 to a T23 because of the T23's 16Mb graphics card and the dual USB ports. Had I known about this I wouldn't have bothered- the T20's sound card was excellent. If you are considering getting a T2x series ThinkPad it would probably be better to sacrifice the better graphics and the dual USB ports in favour of a decent sound card. Dmixing CS4299 For me it worked out of the box adding this to /etc/asound.conf : pcm.dsp0 { type plug slave.pcm dmix } # mixer0 can stay unchanged, because # it isn't used anyway, I guess ;) ctl.mixer0 { type hw card 0 }

Linux OSS driver

This sound chip is supported by the i810_audio kernel module.

Linux ALSA driver

This sound chip is supported by the snd-intel8x0 kernel module.

ThinkPad's this chip may be found in

• A21e, A22e
• A30, A30p
• T23
• X22, X23, X24
• i Series 1200, i Series 1210, i Series 1230, i Series 1250, i Series 1260
• i Series 1300, i Series 1330, i Series 1370