Does anyone know why my external usb sound card - a Novation X-Station - doesn't work properly? It should be supported, but many things crash when trying to output to it - and both aRts and PulseAudio refuses to work with it.
Support for the device in snd-usb-audio is described here:
http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=3114
Please help.
Kristian
2008/4/6, Kristian Dalgard <k.dalgard@xxxxxxxxx>:
Dear List,
The presence of you gives me new hope in my desperate journey for outputting sound through my Novation X-Station in a reasonable manner... a manner that is system wide and doesn't cause applications to crash. This journey is becoming a long one despite the fact that my device is officially supported by the snd-usb-audio driver.
The last four days I have struggled with understanding the many (often very confusingly referenced) layers in producing sound on my system. I have installed stuff, compiled kernel-stuff and edited numerous config-files. And I have grown a lot wiser. But I have also grown more and more convinced that something is amiss deep down at the driver level.
I'm running Kubuntu 7.10, ALSA (libasound2) version 1.0.14. I have an internal Intel sound card besides my X-Station, which is a USB device. I definitely consider myself a newbie in the world of Linux.
For reference, the pages linked to below this paragraph describe the driver my card is using and another person's problem which may be the same as mine. I have also seen mailing list posts about the successful development of support for my device (and the Novation ReMOTE, which should be similar).
http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdev.php?id=3114
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-utils/+bug/148815
Now, a short recap of my troubles:
Upon a clean install of Kubuntu my "XStation" shows up in KMix very nicely alongside my internal devices. It takes me quite a while though to figure out how to make it the active device, which I end up doing with "asoundconf set-default-card XStation" as the card shows up (again, quite nicely) on "asoundconf list" with that name.
This immediately produces sound when playing a wma-audio (I know, RAS syndrome) file in Amarok. When trying to play an mp3, after installing mp3 support (Xine or something), Amarok crashes.
After a reboot, which I thought would in some way consolidate my new choice of default card, the aRts soundserver (artsd) crashes upon logging into KDE. (aRts seems like a terrible choice for KDE anyways, doesn't it...?) Artsd keeps crashing every few seconds but, as far as I can remember now, I am actually able to play some files in Amarok. I quickly do a "reset-default-card", though, as being constantly interrupted by a crash-infobox is frustrating to say the least.
I try disabling my Intel sound card in BIOS, but it only switches focus in my to some kind of tv-card sound device, which doesn't help at all.
Way too many hours of Googl'ing later, I try downgrading ALSA to version 1.0.13. This pays off in a way that sort of moves my problems around a bit. I am able to play mp3s (with the sound being output through my X-Station, of course) but having trouble with other sources and various stuff crashes spontaneously... I then try compiling and applying version 1.0.16 on my kernel with somewhat the same general results, and lastly I do a full reinstall of the beta version of Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy. The last move is to make sure everything ALSA is included and tested by others.
During all of my attempts (which include other dead ends advised in different places) I have tried editing relevant conf-files including adding my device to .asoundrc in the ways described in forum posts and articles and setting and resetting asoundconf default-card. But it seems that aRts never really works with my device and other applications either crash, produce sound for less than a second, do not produce sound at all or ... play just fine.
Now I have made a very comprehensive installation of PulseAudio on my system. I have followed every step in the official guide, and all in all this seems like a very nice setup. The "Volume Control" utility seems to work great and my applications produce sound - all on my internal sound card. My X-Station on the other hand is not even listed under "sinks" in the volume control util.
The absence of the X-Station is not unexpected, though, although it still shows up in KMix; when running pulseaudio un-daemonized in console I get a lot of errors which I think at least hint of the level of my problem. The output is as follows:
kristian@medion:~$ pkill pulseaudio
kristian@medion:~$ pulseaudio
W: main.c: WARNING: called SUID root, but not in group 'pulse-rt'.
E: module-alsa-sink.c: Failed to set hardware parameters: Operation not permitted
E: module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device=hw:1"): initialization failed.
E: module-alsa-source.c: Failed to set hardware parameters: Operation not permitted
E: module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-source" (argument: "device=hw:1"): initialization failed.
W: alsa-util.c: device doesn't support 44100 Hz, changed to 48000 Hz.
W: alsa-util.c: Cannot find mixer control "Capture".
W: alsa-util.c: Cannot find fallback mixer control "Mic".
W: alsa-util.c: device doesn't support 44100 Hz, changed to 48000 Hz.
W: alsa-util.c: Cannot find mixer control "Capture".
W: alsa-util.c: Cannot find fallback mixer control "Mic".
E: sound-file.c: Failed to open file /usr/share/sounds/gtk-events/activate.wav
E: main.c: Failed to load sound file.
kristian@medion:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC882 Analog [ALC882 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC882 Digital [ALC882 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: XStation [XStation], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
I am not able to say in what way PulseAudio, ALSA, aRts, the ALSA kernel drivers and the USB layer is linked together - in fact, I am pretty confused about this - but it seems to me, that the trouble begins in trying to communicate with the device at driver level. The X-Station does produce sound in certain situations, which really adds to my frustration, and support for the device has been added/checked with the driver.
Making this work is very important to me and the only real problem I'm having with Kubuntu so far. I really hope someone here is able to help. And I sincerely apologize for my verbosity, it is getting quite late here in Denmark...
Thank you for reading, anyway!
Kristian Dalgård
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