[linux-audio-user] "PDAudio-CF on Laptop with Linux" Adventures

Greetings listers. I thought I'd share some things I discovered last night. After spending an inordinate amount of time (not all at one sitting) trying to figure out how to solve this problem... ~/test-alsa/ arecord -D pdaudiocf -f cd foo.wav Recording WAVE 'foo.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo arecord: pcm_read:1196: read error: Input/output error ...I made some discoveries. This started happening to me after coming fresh to the laptop one evening, ready to transfer an old concert tape. The PDAudio-CF having worked like a champ before, I was starting to get nervous that something odd had happened. Turns out, after going to the #alsa group on freenode and getting a huge amount of attention from one kind soul, who eventually pointed me to one of the alsa list archives, combined with something I seemed to recall reading somewhere, that the tape was at 48k, and the PDAudio-CF doesn't do hardware sample rate conversion. So why I am I telling you this? Well, for one thing, if my notes ever get deleted, I can always check this archive. :) But I hope to save someone else the problem. WHAT TO DO: So, if you get this error, and it seems out of the blue (like the thing was *just* working!!!), Check what the card thinks the incoming sample rate is. You can do this: amixer -c <card#> contents. In there somewhere you'll see something about "IEC958 External Rate", and the next line will be the incoming sample rate (in samples/sec). you'll want to make sure that the incoming sample rate and outgoing sample rate are the same. So in my case for last night, I needed to do the following with the 48k tape: arecord -c hw:1,0 -r 48000 -f dat foo.wav BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Before I got to that solution, I found this nifty shell script in the alsa archives that let's you specify optical/coax input. It automagically figures out which hardware slot the PDAudio-CF occupies. Here's a link the alsa archives message containing the script: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=7502478 That's it for today. I'm looking forward to recording my first live convert this weekend using this device (backed up with DAT just in case...)! Regards, Daniel Zuckerman