[Solved] Yet another USB Headset thread

[badc0d3d]

Hello everyone! My first post here, from an old time Slacker.
After leaving slackware and trying fedora, suse, ubuntu, then debian(which most of my servers are with),
I switched to Gentoo as my desktop distro about 2 years ago. With some help from friends I managed to learn a lot about this distro and I fell in love with it.
Yet I've never had a problem that I couldn't solve with sufficient time googling, or searching in forums. But this one went way too long.
The USB headset I am trying to have properly working has rocking loud and clear sound on Windows, Debian and Mint 15. I love them even they are not some famous HiFi brand.
I have integrated soundcard (intel), HDMI audio and my USB Headset. I want to have my USB headset as PRIMARY input and output device.
So:
c0@home ~ $ lsusb | grep Head
Bus 003 Device 006: ID 05e1:2010 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd ARCTIC Sound P261 Headphones

c0@home ~ $ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
--snip--
card 3: Device [USB VoIP Device], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

c0@home ~ $ cat /etc/kernels/kernel-config-x86_64-3.10.7-gentoo-r1 | grep SND_USB
CONFIG_SND_USB=y
CONFIG_SND_USB_AUDIO=m
CONFIG_SND_USB_UA101=m
CONFIG_SND_USB_USX2Y=m
CONFIG_SND_USB_CAIAQ=m
# CONFIG_SND_USB_CAIAQ_INPUT is not set
# CONFIG_SND_USB_US122L is not set
CONFIG_SND_USB_6FIRE=m
-------------
They are working with applications like Skype in which I can manually choose output/input device(they have mic too), firefox and flash do not produce sound

After I try playing aplay like this, which is the most frustrating part:
c0@home ~ $ aplay -D hw:0,3 M1F1-int32-AFsp.wav #which is a sample wav file
aplay: main:722: audio open error: Device or resource busy
I get this one above. It becomes worse

c0@home ~ $ sudo /etc/init.d/alsasound restart
Password:
* WARNING: you are stopping a boot service
* Storing ALSA Mixer Levels ... [ ok ]
* Restoring Mixer Levels ...
alsactl: set_control:1461: Cannot write control '3:3:0:Playback Channel Map:0' : Device or resource busy [ ok ]

I am not sure what is [ok] with restarting the service while the device is busy.
I thought that having the CONFIG_SND_USB module built-in into the kernel messes up, so i just had rebuild the kernel and the module, marking it as a separate instead building it into the kernel.
Actually i marked the whole CONFIG_SND tree as separate modules.
did genkernel all as usual. (yes I am lazy sysadmin, and i love it)
Yet there is no change, makes the same mess.
Tried various things and combinations with /etc/asound.conf, /etc/udev/udev.conf, ~/.asoundrc, with no success, reverting to default values.
ALSA and friends are built, tested and working, for about a year over 4 completely different systems.
It's just that I never tried USB Audio peripherals on my Gentoo. So I am kinda ... out of options for now
I am open to any suggestions

[badc0d3d]

Nevermind. I got it working.
I am not sure whether jack plays really a key role, but enabled "jack" use flag.
Even though, pavucontrol DIDN'T see the headphones at all!

reemerged alsa-plugins, PulseAudio and pavucontrol
[ebuild R ] media-sound/pulseaudio-4.0 USE="X alsa asyncns caps dbus gdbm glib gtk ipv6 jack orc ssl tcpd udev webrtc-aec -avahi -bluetooth -doc -equalizer -gnome -libsamplerate -lirc (-neon) (-oss) -qt4 -realtime (-system-wide) -systemd {-test} -xen"
[ebuild R ] media-plugins/alsa-plugins-1.0.27 USE="jack pulseaudio -debug -ffmpeg -libsamplerate -speex"
[ebuild R ] media-sound/pavucontrol-1.0 USE="nls"

stumbled upon http://alsa.opensrc.org/Usb-audio
pasted the first code block into /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf

rebooted

pavucontrol had enumerated the headphones, so i was finally able to select them as output/input device
Everything works like a charm.