Excerpts from allcoms's message of 2011-06-07 13:13:12 +0200: > Hi Linux Audio Land! > > I've been thinking recently just how useful it would be- certainly to > Linux audio distros and (Linux (audio)) newbs, if we had an app that > could tell you what sound systems are currently active and let you > test them- both audio in and output for ALSA, JACK and Pulse at the > very least but FFADO, esound, phonon and whatever else would be great > to see included too. Even for a Linux old-timer like me its tough > remembering all the different mixers, daemons and diagnostic utils and > commands to work out where you are when you have sound trouble. If it > can't fix your problems automagically then it would be good if it > could advise the user on how to get their desired sound system > functional, if not optimised as in the case of JACK as I think that > could end up being its own app or should be integrated into qjackctl. > JACK gives more useful error messages now which should help in putting > something like this together but AFAIK there's nothing out there like > this atm. > > Anyone know of an existing app like this or if work has already begun > on such a tool? I only know of a script that checks the environment and tries to figure out whether system settings are sane for pro audio, but I know of no program to test all possible audio systems. The idea is good, but I see some potential problems: - dependencies: would one need to install every sound system to run the program? I think it would be necessary to discover sound systems at runtime, which, I guess, is hard, because so few programs do it. - distribution dependent stuff: I think about paths and stuff. It could be hard to give sane advise if configuration is different between distributions. - relevant non-audio stuff: Non-audio stuff also needs to be taken into account, for example: recently I talked to someone on IRC who had trouble with getting jack to run. I talked him through all the typical things and it still didn't work. It turned out that policykit was at fault. It's a good idea but I doubt it's easy to do. Are you a programmer and have experience with the necessary stuff? To me it looks like a worthwhile thing and something I'd like to work on during the summer, but I doubt I could do it alone. This is definitely a team job, especially because it needs to be tested on various setups. Regards, Philipp _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
