Greetings listers.
I thought I'd share some things I discovered last night.
After spending an inordinate amount of time (not all at one sitting)
trying to figure out how to solve this problem...
~/test-alsa/ arecord -D pdaudiocf -f cd foo.wav
Recording WAVE 'foo.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz,
Stereo
arecord: pcm_read:1196: read error: Input/output error
...I made some discoveries. This started happening to me after coming
fresh to the laptop one evening, ready to transfer an old concert tape.
The PDAudio-CF having worked like a champ before, I was starting to get
nervous that something odd had happened. Turns out, after going to the
#alsa group on freenode and getting a huge amount of attention from one
kind soul, who eventually pointed me to one of the alsa list archives,
combined with something I seemed to recall reading somewhere, that the
tape was at 48k, and the PDAudio-CF doesn't do hardware sample rate
conversion.
So why I am I telling you this?
Well, for one thing, if my notes ever get deleted, I can always check
this archive. :)
But I hope to save someone else the problem.
WHAT TO DO:
So, if you get this error, and it seems out of the blue (like the thing
was *just* working!!!),
Check what the card thinks the incoming sample rate is. You can do this:
amixer -c <card#> contents.
In there somewhere you'll see something about "IEC958 External Rate",
and the next line will be the incoming sample rate (in samples/sec).
you'll want to make sure that the incoming sample rate and outgoing
sample rate are the same. So in my case for last night, I needed to do
the following with the 48k tape:
arecord -c hw:1,0 -r 48000 -f dat foo.wav
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:
Before I got to that solution, I found this nifty shell script in the
alsa archives that let's you specify optical/coax input. It
automagically figures out which hardware slot the PDAudio-CF occupies.
Here's a link the alsa archives message containing the script:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=7502478
That's it for today. I'm looking forward to recording my first live
convert this weekend using this device (backed up with DAT just in case...)!
Regards,
Daniel Zuckerman
