7. References

If you have a sound card that supports a CD-ROM or SCSI interface, the Linux SCSI HOWTO and the Linux CD-ROM HOWTO have additional information that may be useful to you.

The Sound Playing HOWTO describes how to play various types of sound and music files under Linux.

The Linux SoundBlaster AWE32/64 Mini-HOWTO describes how to get a SoundBlaster 32 or 64 card working under Linux.

Programming information is available from the 4Front Technologies web site at http://www.opensound.com/pguide.

The following FAQs are regularly posted to the Usenet newsgroup news.announce as well as being archived at ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers:

PCsoundcards/generic-faq (Generic PC Soundcard FAQ)
PCsoundcards/soundcard-faq (comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard FAQ)
PCsoundcards/gravis-ultrasound/faq (Gravis UltraSound FAQ)
audio-fmts/part1 (Audio file format descriptions)
audio-fmts/part2 (Audio file format descriptions)

The FAQs also list several product specific mailing lists and archive sites. The following Usenet news groups discuss sound and/or music related issues:

alt.binaries.sounds.* (various groups for posting sound files)
alt.binaries.multimedia (for posting Multimedia files)
alt.sb.programmer (Soundblaster programming topics)
comp.multimedia (Multimedia topics)
comp.music (Computer music theory and research)
comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.* (various IBM PC sound card groups)

A web site dedicated to multimedia can be found at http://www.scala.com/multimedia/. Another good site for Linux MIDI and sound applications is http://sound.condorow.net/. Creative Labs has a web site at http://www.creaf.com/.

The Linux mailing list has a number of "channels" dedicated to different topics. To find out how to join, send a mail message with the word "help" as the message body to majordomo@vger.kernel.org.

As mentioned several times before, the kernel sound driver includes a number of Readme files containing useful information about the sound card driver. These can typically be found in the directory /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound.

Information on OSS, the commercial sound driver for Linux and other Unix compatible operating systems, can be found at the 4Front Technologies web page at http://www.opensound.com/.

The Linux Software Map (LSM) is an invaluable reference for locating Linux software. The LSM home page is at http://www.ExecPC.com/lsm/. and there is an on-line browsable version at http://www.boutell.com/lsm/.

Another great site for finding Linux applications is http://www.freshmeat.net/.

The Linux Documentation Project has produced several books on Linux, including Linux Installation and Getting Started. These are freely available by anonymous FTP from major Linux archive sites or can be purchased in hardcopy format.

Finally, a shameless plug: If you want to learn a lot more about multimedia under Linux (especially CD-ROM and sound card applications and programming), check out my book Linux Multimedia Guide, ISBN 1-56592-219-0, published by O'Reilly and Associates. As well as the original English version, French and Japanese translations are now in print. For details, call 800-998-9938 in North America or check the web page http://www.ora.com/catalog/multilinux/noframes.html.