Alsa born-again newbie problems? Anyone running emu10k1?

fert · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 40

For years, my system has just worked just running straight alsa, an audigy-4, and spdif output to a receiver, and so I failed to follow any developments and am now at a loss...

As stated, I'm running alsa/emu10k1 with no sound server like pulseaudio, etc. It had worked fine as far as hardware mixing of audio sources, outputting them via spdif to my receiver, all without any .asoundrc shenanigans. A simple mplayer config then had it sending ac3 via passthrough, which turned on and off automatically (ie if I had some wav audio playing, then started playing a movie with ac3, passthrough would function, cutting off all other sounds, and upon completion, it would revert to playing the wav source).

After the update, everything stopped working, soundwise, even though the receiver indicated it was receiving some sort of signal.

Being short of time, I quickly tried to follow some wikis and got a hobbled together system that partly functions. No hardware mixing (only one program can access the device at a time), ac3 passthrough most often must be activated/deactivated manually through alsamixer or iecset, flash videos won't play sound through firefox, etc.

I have a little free time now and would like to get back to a fully functioning audio system if possible. Has something fundamentally broken or been changed with alsa and emu10k1 as of late?

Should https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ALSA#S.2FPDIF and/or http://alsa.opensrc.org/DigitalOut do the job? I've tried using those and still cannot come up with my old functionality.

khayyam · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2016 9:27 pm Post subject:

fert ...

I'm not sure I can add anything of value, but I recently build a 3.18.29 kernel and discoved that if alsa (SND_HDA_I915 in my case) wasn't builtin then /dev/snd device nodes weren't created. I generally build alsa as modules, and with 3.13.x this works fine, but 3.18.29 not (for some inexplicable reason). So, perhaps there was some subtle change made to alsa, and this might explain what's happening in your case ... thought it worth mentioning.

best ... khay