On my way to become an advanced Linux user I started to learn ALSA. However, it seems that ALSA, and sound system in general on Linux, is in a pretty bad state at the moment. Here are the examples - don't get me wrong, fix me if I got things wrong: 1) my work computer with Ubuntu has HDA Intel PCH soundcard installed. Moving PCM slider in alsamixer or muting it has no effect. This happens both when pulseaudio server is stopped and running. Moreover, manipulating volume slider inside pavucontrol results in higher volume than when Master and Speakers are set to maximum in alsamixer alone. That means, if I set a maximum volume inside pavucontrol I can hear sound louder because even if volume is set to maximum in alsamixer it is only about 50% in pavucontrol. 2) my home laptop HP Pavilion DV6 3015ew with Slackware has HDA ATI SB soundcard installed. Here, moving PCM slider in alsamixer changes volume correctly but PCM cannot be muted. Nothing happens in alsamixer when I press `m', and amixer says: $ amixer set PCM mute amixer: Invalid command! pulseaudio is not running here. Why is PCM observed behavior not coherent between 1) and 2) ? 3) my Toshiba n550d netbook has 2 soundcards - alsamixer shows "HD-Audio Generic" and "HDA ATI SB". What is bad is that the first card is set as default but it has no controls in alsamixer apart from "S/PDIF". Why this has happened? It brings some problems in programs that pick the first available card and treat it as default. For example, mocp says: Running the server... Trying OSS... FATAL_ERROR: No valid sound driver FATAL_ERROR: Server exited I needed to the following to $HOME/.moc/config: AlsaDevice = hw:1,0 4) What's the relationship between Alsa, PulseAudio and OSS? On my HP Pavilion laptop I installed Linphone, a cool SIP client but I wasn't able to use it with my in-built mic until I set capture device to "OSS: /dev/dsp" in Linphone. I was looking for some general information on how to configure a microphone and I found this: http://alsa.opensrc.org/Record_from_mic. However, this guide contains expressions such as "I am not sure about that" or "Other things to try: " and a list of random thoughts follows. And about PulseAudio, I remember back in days that killing PulseAudio was the very first thing to do after starting the system to able to hear any sound at all. 5) My parents have Acer Aspire d255. It has some problems with in-built microphone - it doesn't work. This bug describes it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/940841. Does anybody know if this problem is solved now in new kernel, new ALSA or is it solved at all? My parents are computer illiterate, they used to have Windows 7 Starter on this machine but it took it like 15 minutes to start so I removed it and installed Ubuntu for them. Now I have to explain to them why the microphone doesn't work out of the box. 6) A few months ago I got myself Creative bluetooth speakers. I have the following in my ~/.asoundrc.conf: Quote: pcm.bluetooth { type bluetooth device 00:02:3C:20:1D:5E } pcm.!default { type plug slave.pcm "bluetooth" } Some programs such as xmms2 can pick these settings correctly and play music on speakers, but some others such as mplayer can't do that and I always have to pass "-ao alsa:device=bluetooth" what's really annoying (I could create an alias for that but it's just a workaround and not a real solution). What's even more, I can't play sound in 2 programs simultaneously - only one program at a time can play sound. If I open a flash video in Firefox, I need to close it before I can play a song in xmms2. xmms2 for example is saying: Please check that: Your sound card is configured properly You have the correct output plugin selected No other program is blocking the sound card That's all. I am quite worried about all of these. It makes me thing that Linux is still not ready for wider adoption amongst casual users. -- <wempwer@xxxxxxxxx> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, & PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
