[linux-audio-user] A couple of questions

Lee Revell rlrevell at joe-job.com
Sun Apr 2 13:11:26 EDT 2006


On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 16:52 +0000, carmen wrote:
> > 
> > > How can a user who just bought a USB audio device make it the 
> > > default device?
> 
> even if they do have the USB-audio module, likely the device will show up at hw:1.0.0. at which point the user has to either reorder the module loading via /etc/modules.d trickery, or do some asound.conf/rc magic to change the 'default' device to something 'sides hw:0.0.0. this isnt very intuitive..
> 

Any reasonable distro will hide these implementation details from the
user.

> 
> > 
> > System->Preferences->Sound then select the USB audio device from the
> > "Default sound card" menu
> 
> let me guess, this changes the Gstreamer output device? woo, the Nautilus clicky-sounds go to the right place now!~!. if its actually changing the 'default' device for ALSA, that could be useful. which util is this?
> 

No I believe it actually sets the ALSA "default" device by modifying the
ALSA config files or module config.  I can't test it as I only have the
one card.  This is a Gnome 2.14 feature.

> > >  How does (or why must) a user know which module 
> > > to use for his card?
> > 
> > On what distro does a user have to know this?  It should Just Work -
> 
> admittedly ive only installed debian and gentoo in the past year. but both required manually looking up the module name from http://alsa-project.org, then either manually editing /etc/make.conf and defining ALSA_CARDS, or downloading the alsa-driver tarball, and running make-kpkg and installing that with dpkg. neither one 'just worked'...
> 

These are distro bugs, apparently Debian does not ship the driver for
your card (probably due to firmware loadibng issues), and of course
Gentoo requires you to do it manually.

> > They don't, if they use a newbie-friendly distro. 
> 
> neither SuSE or Ubuntu came up with my Echo card, even though its been rolled into the main alsa-driver tree for like a year now. maybe it has to do with the fact that its not in the kernel alsa driver and only the module version? something to do with firmware dependencies, perhaps..
> 

File bug reports with your distro(s).

Lee




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