[linux-audio-user] Soundless ALSA Newbie

[Sakari Aaltonen]

On 9 Jan 2003, Jan "Evil Twin" Depner wrote:

> There was a reply earlier about running ./snddevices.  If you don't do
> that you won't get anything.  After you do that you'll probably have to
> run modprobe again.  If you install exactly as directed in the INSTALL
> file in the alsa-driver.. directory it should work.
> 
> Jan

Well, my ALSA setup could be OK right now, but I don't seem to under-
stand how to *use* it. For example, I didn't know the M's on top of
alsamixer's bars meant "mute" - I thought muting was accomplished by
setting the volume to zero... I have no idea what some of the bars
are for. amixer says there are some 20 simple controls and some 40
complex ones. This is much too complicated for me.

After I unmuted Main and PCM, I did get some sound output with
aplay and a MIDI file (from the old playmidi package.) But it
was garbage - evidently, aplay didn't recognize the format.
And xine won't use ALSA at all, so the unmuting didn't help
the DVD-and-TV thing.

As I said earlier, I was unable to compile TiMidity. I'm still
looking for a MIDI player that I could make run. 


Sakari Aaltonen