[LAU] Linux Audio Diagnostics Tool

[allcoms]

I think it was someone in #ubuntustudio or #opensourcemusicians who
alerted me to a project I've not tried out just yet by falktx called
cadence

http://repo.or.cz/w/cadence.git

Sounds like it might be what I'm after but won't know until I try.
Anyone beat me to it who can comment on its suitability right now as a
Linux audio diagnostics tool?

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Philipp Überbacher
<hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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