ALSA is difficult

donjames · Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 5:36 am Post subject: ALSA is difficult

Hi,

For what it's worth.

I have been working on my laptop trying to get the sound working for the past 4 days.

My problem is trying to get all of the sound to go to the USB headset. I have been unable to accomplish this.

I am totally and thoroughly disgusted with ALSA, the support and the pseudo-documentation.

People are still making the mistake of trying to write generalized documentation for all distributions of Linux. Well, in my opinion it is worthless.

What we need is examples that are specific to Gentoo. If I knew enough about ALSA as implemented on Gentoo, then I would be glad to write specific documentation.

ALSA sucks.

gentoo_ram · Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 7:59 am Post subject:

From what I can tell, there is no such thing as "send all sound to the USB headset". You have to tell each program which sound device to use. That seems to be the design of ALSA. I guess it's good in that it lets you point one program at one device and another program at a different device. The bad news is that each program seems to implement this design somewhat differently.

You have to look at /proc/asound/cards. Is your headset listed there? If it's index zero, then that's good because it'll probably be the default. But if it's index 1, then you'll have to tell each program to send sound to that device.

For example, 'mpg321 -o alsa -a 1:0 foo.mp3'.

In amarok, I had to tell it to play to 'hw:1,0'.

Once you do that, you'll need to use a mixer program to set the sound output levels. The default is EVERYTHING MUTED. So if you do nothing, you get no sound. Be sure to check that, too.

sera · Retired Dev Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 1017 Location: CET

donjames · Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 5:37 pm Post subject: ALSA is difficult

Hi sera,

I have two questions:

1) Where is /etc/asound.conf? I can't find it in my system. Do I just create it?

2) How exactly do you only enable the sound device you wish to use in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf?

Thanks,

Don James

donjames · Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 5:52 pm Post subject: ALSA is difficult

Hello gentoo_ram,

You seem to be right -- each application implements the sound interface in a different way. XLite will only talk to the oss sound, not to alsa. KsCD running under KDE seems to, as its default, talk only to the built-in speakers.

There is no menu on the KsCD GUI that allows selection of the sound output device. It may have to be launched on the command line. I can't seem to find a configuration file for KsCD. Oh, well.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf to set the default sound device.

Also trying to figure out /root/.asoundrc.

I did get all of the sound to go to the usb headset.
First I took all of the alsa sound out of the kernel except for the usb sound.
Recompiled the kernel.
Shut down the machine.
Unplugged the usb headset.
Booted the machine.
Plugged in the usb headset.
Now, all of the sound goes to the usb headset. Even the sound from KsCD.
But, XLite has no sound at all.

Thanks for your input.

Don James

timeBandit · Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2010 7:06 pm Post subject:

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Duplicate Threads.
See .asoundrc help.
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