[linux-audio-dev] question re: hammerfall cards

Thomas Vander Stichele thomas at urgent.rug.ac.be
Tue Mar 4 06:15:01 UTC 2003


Hi Paul,

thanks for the quick answers, I tried things as soon as I got back.

I've been experimenting some more (sometimes analogue audio is so much 
easier to debug), and I'm slowly learning stuff, but I haven't been able 
to actually record things yet.

So, on to some more questions ...

> there are a couple of ways. alsactl is probably the most obvious:
> 
>       % alsactl -f foo store
>       ... edit "foo" ...
>       % alsactl -f foo restore

That seems to work as you says it does (apart from the fact that I can't 
verify it actually works yet :)).  I haven't seen this in any of the ALSA 
docs I read through (granted, most of those were updated and seemed to be 
pre-0.9, so I can't even tell how relevant some of those docs are) - did I 
miss some more important document, or a most recent version of it ? Or did 
I just miss it in my eagerness ?
 
After connecting S/PDIF input to the two cards, I wanted to try and record 
stuff to see if I actually got the signal in.

I'm using arecord with various options.
arecord -l gives me
[root at framboos tmp]# arecord -l
card 0: 15 [RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5)], device 0: RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5) [RME 
Digi9636 (Rev 1.5)]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: 15_1 [RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5)], device 0: RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5) 
[RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5)]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

arecord -L gives me a whole lot of output to stderr which I can't fully 
understand at this point.

-d should allow me to specify a device, but I have no idea in what syntax 
this is for which card.  I tried a few things:
- specifying 0 and 1
- specifying 15 and 15_1, the card ids
- specifying "spdif" (based on output of arecord -L, but I don't know how 
I would choose between cards in that case)
- specifying random numbers, which seems to do something even though I 
can't imagine what it would be recording from in those cases.

In some cases it terminates after a second, which probably means I 
specified an invalid device, but I don't get errors.

I have run with -v as well, but that seems to give information about 
internal (software) plugins to do the recording.

All of the files I recorded I encoded with oggenc as a quick hack - if the 
bitrate is 0.8 kb/sec, I'm pretty safe in assuming that I recorded silence 
:)

So basically, my questions are :
a) is there some alsa-enabled recorder that allows me to choose devices 
easily and allows for monitoring the incoming signal ?
b) what is the correct way (or a doc describing it) to specify devices for 
arecord ? Is arecord using the "ALSA-standard" way of doing this, as is 
done in other applications ?
c) could I have forgotten anything else here when trying to record stuff ? 
I assume that, since the Hammerfall doesn't have a mixer chip, the channel 
is always-on.

If there isn't any Hammerfall quick how-to, I wouldn't mind writing my 
experiences down if that could be helpful for anyone.

Thanks in advance,
Thomas

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