Karl Ranseier wrote:

I've a C-Media PCI CMI8738 (model 37) running with alsa 0.9beta10.

I realy would like to get 24 bit on the S/P DIF interface.

So I do:

...

madplay --bit-depth=24 music.mp3

MPEG Audio Decoder 0.14.2 (beta) - Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Robert Leslie output: bit depth 24 not available; using 16

Any ideas?

madplay doesn't have an ALSA output module (yet). You're probably using the OSS output module, and most systems don't support more than 16 bits with OSS.

Is there another ALSA program you can use to output raw samples? Then you could pipe output from madplay with --output=raw:-