I gave up trying to configure the i82801BA audio
which is built into the Intel D815EEA2 motherboard.
I bought and installed a SoundBlaster 16 PCI, one
of the oldest and most ubiquitous sound cards on
Earth. It autoconfigures at boot, thus... 

gus: {2} dmesg | grep audio0
audio0 at eap0: full duplex, mmap, independent
audio0 at eap0: full duplex, mmap, independent
gus: {3} 

...and KDE2 can play MP3's through it. But mostly
I wanted to record. I still can not properly record,
even after two days of fiddling. 

First I tried using these: audiorecord, mixctl,
audioctl and audioplay. I had to kill KDE2 though,
so as to avoid an error saying the device was "busy".
My best result after hours of trial and error
was a low-volume and very scratchy playback. 

So I gave up on the CLI stuff and swicthed over to
some X tools: xmix, xwave and KDE Sound Mixer. These
gave low-volume but clear playback. The scratchiness,
at lest, was now gone. 

It is interestinig to note that even tough pkg_info
reports that xwave is at version 2.0, xwave itself
still displays that it is version 0.6. Still, it does
seem to work. So not really a problem there. 

My on-going headache has to do with mic volume. I
can't seem to adjust the mic volume with either
xmix or with KDE2 Sound Mixer. The slide pots will
not stay slid. In both the slide pot pops back
down to near zero. 

In playback on xwave, the volume is about as low
as it was when I was using the CLI tools. It is,
at least, no longer scratchy...but the volume is
still stuck very low. 

It is not the card and it is not the mic. I have
booted to Win2K and tried the recording tools
there. It was all completely intuitive on Win2K. 

There must be something else I am needing to do in
NetBSD and/or KDE2 so as to increase the mic volume
for recording. Anybody have a clue what it is? 

And one last question, anybody know why KRecord is
missing from Multimedia in KDE2? 

Thanks, 

Gan Starling
Kalamazoo, Michigan
USA