[linux-audio-dev] Juce now has ALSA support!

[David Kastrup]

Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> writes:

> On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 19:57 +0000, Chris Cannam wrote:
>> On Wednesday 01 Mar 2006 19:03, Lee Revell wrote:
>> > Actually I think Julian has a point - I can't find the doc anywhere
>> > that says you output to the front speakers by opening the "front"
>> > device and rear the "rear" device, that apps should open the
>> > "default" PCM by default, that "hw:x" should only be used for special
>> > cases where direct hardware access is requires (like JACK), etc.
>> 
>> Only half a dozen people in the world know these things.  And here you 
>> are leaking them onto a public mailing list!
>
> aplay -L
>
> ...
> cards 'cards.pcm'
> front 'cards.pcm.front'
> rear 'cards.pcm.rear'
> center_lfe 'cards.pcm.center_lfe'
> side 'cards.pcm.side'
> surround40 'cards.pcm.surround40'
> surround41 'cards.pcm.surround41'
> surround50 'cards.pcm.surround50'
> surround51 'cards.pcm.surround51'
> surround71 'cards.pcm.surround71'
> iec958 'cards.pcm.iec958'
> spdif 'cards.pcm.iec958'
> modem 'cards.pcm.modem'
> phoneline 'cards.pcm.phoneline'
> default 'cards.pcm.default'
> dmix 'cards.pcm.dmix'
> dsnoop 'cards.pcm.dsnoop'

It is actually more like a hoax.  To wit: I have a builtin sound card
into my laptop without any spdif/iec958 folderol.  Now I plug in an
IEC958 adapter into USB (which counts as a soundcard of its own).

What happens now if I do
aplay -D spdif something.wav
?  Most certainly not the soundcard with the S/PDIF output gets used.
Instead some nonsense happens.

I have found no way whatsoever to get this card to output anything
except by using Ubuntu's Sound preference setting to make the
ridiculous S/PDIF only sound gadget the default sound device.

Only then will I ever get aplay (which in contrast to alsamixer does
not have something like a -c 1 option to specify card 1) to use the
SPDIF gadget.  But I don't want to use the gadget for all of my
output.

And I have been unable to find any man page or info or web page
accessible by Google that would tell me how to do this.

It is rather silly.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum