Creative Sound Blaster ZX sound card and opensuse 12.3

English Hardware
#1

R.S.Sardesai (user rss1936)
Mumbai- India

Dear Sir,
The senior moderator for hardware forum had kindly informed me that Creative labs’ sound blaster X-FI Titanium was 100% compatible with Open SuSe 12.3. However the X-FI titanium card is not available . The sound cards available from Creative labs are sound blaster Z, and ZX. I would like to know whether the ZX card works with Open SuSe 12.3.
My PC :
Custom made; Intel quad core core I7-3770 CPU;ASUS P8Z77-VLX motherboard; 16 GB DDR3 RAM; 500GB SATA HDD for windows7 64 bit Professional; 500 GB SATA HDD for 64 bit Open SuSe12.3; on board sound; PCIE 210 ZOTAC 1GB Display Card; 2 numbers SATA LG DVD Writers; 24" Samsung LED Monitor;DLINK DSL2730U Router;
with Regards
R. S. Sardesai

#2

Is there another name for the sound blaster zx ?

Some sound device compatibility web pages:

Neither link above mentions the ZX. Does Creating labs also refer to it by a different name?

I note the 3.9 kernel (that is in openSUSE-12.3) also supports the Creative CA0132 DSP, but I don’t know if that is relevant to the Creative Sound Blaster ZX (reference: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwODM) . Likely openSUSE-13.1 with its 3.11 kernel has a superior chance of working with the CA0132 (but i don’t know that for certain). I have read posts on a Ubuntu forum where with the 3.11 kernel that Ubuntu users could get sound working on Creative sound devices with the CA0132.

But there is also a bug report on openSUSE-13.1 where a user failed to get sound working with a Sound Blaster Z with its CA0132: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=863494 and the thread (where the user failed is here: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495168-No-sound-(?highlight=CA0132 ). It appears the user gave up, as they now ignore our suggestions in that help thread, and they now ignore the suggestions in the bug report.

I myself would not be too optimistic about its GNU/Linux compatibility. Perhaps someone else with real life experience with that hardware will chime in.

#3

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Hi! Thank you very much for your suggestions and information. I will be looking for people experience with creative’s zx sound card under open suse 12.3 environment.
Any way I am thinking of getting this zx card which works in Windows 7 professional. I have one query: Is it possible to read and process the digitized audio data under windows environment in open suse 12.3? I think it should be as it would be .wav file.
Regards
rss1936

#4

It all depends on the codecs used. Not 100% sure what you want to do but I’m guessing that you want to play media files that are on a Windows partition. So yes if the Windows partition is mounted you should be able to play assuming a supported codec is used.