Can You Hear Me?

I still don’t have a fully functioning sound system on my machine at work. I can listen to my MP3s, but I have to restart the sound server every 20 minutes because the driver for my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is only an evaluation copy. “What gives?” you ask….”Don’t you work on a linux box? Isn’t everything free as in beer?” Well, no. Since CreativeLabs hasn’t completely released the code for the driver, and the new chipsets on the Soundblaster cards aren’t compatible with the old ALSA drivers. 4Front Technologies has a driver for linux boxen, but it’s not free. Now, if anyone might happen to *find* a license key floating around the internet, please let me know, but for the moment I have a script to restart the sound server (and XMMS) every 20 minutes…..