for example, the Gentoo user mailing list is full of questions like "I did follow the excellent Gentoo ALSA user guide, but I still get no sound." How can a user who just bought a USB audio device make it the default device? How can a user interested in JACK easily find the right settings for his card? How does (or why must) a user know which module to use for his card? How can a user disable a certain card? All this is of little interest for myself, I have learned how to set up my system. But new linux audio users should never be in need to edit config files manually in vi. Best regards ce

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.. 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? 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'... 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..

Huh, and even the indexing magic if you own more than one USB-device and you want them to appear in ALSA in a certain order! A further issue: I have configured the USB card as the default device. What will happen if I remove it or left it at home while I'm on the road? Will ALSA automatically fall back to the internal audio card of my notebook? Best regards ce

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 10:22 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: I tend to agree with Lee on this one. Gentoo is designed for those who want to do things the hard way. Granted, it probably can help newbies to understand Linux a bit better but it's a tough row to hoe. Suse or Fedora are probably much easier to deal with. If you're a newbie and you're really serious about getting sound to work you're better off with Planet CCRMA or DeMuDi. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 22:05 +0200, Christoph Eckert wrote: True. Unfortunately it looks like it will be a while before any of the big distros will be ready. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 17:12 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: You think they'll come out with the low latency patches installed? I haven't been keeping up with the kernel stuff. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

Hi! Alle 23:32, domenica 2 aprile 2006, Lee Revell ha scritto: I can get 5.33 ms with a SBLive and a vanilla 2.6.16, on a PIII 866, with Xruns at opening of programs, and being able to charge up to 90% of CPU. I think this is what you mean with "good audio performance":) I tried a RT-patched kernel, but it was instable, and moreover I don't feel I need it. Byez! Carotinho ___________________________________ Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB http://mail.yahoo.it

I think it's more than just that. It's even the preconfiguration of other parts of the system that makes musicians happy users of the specialized distros. Best regards ce

absolutely! Best regards ce

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 16:49 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: Well, that's what I meant by OOTB... Yep, that already was happening in the latest kernels/pam in fc4. -- Fernando

On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 21:27 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: Yes, maybe that would be a workaround. It still looks to me like it will be impossible (with the current state of the art) to enable something like this in a generic distro. Maybe an additional package that configures only this option? To be installed by users who (supposedly) know what the consequences might be? For that to be "packageable" /etc/security/limits.conf should be splittable into different files I guess, otherwise you would depend on scripts to tweak that. Anyway, does not look good either. Obviously it depends on what your audio needs may be. If running Jack without -R is fine then the problem goes away :-) -- Fernando

...and Fernando could do more interesting things than building packages ;) . Best regards ce

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 13:27 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: As you well know, I used to do everything on a "build it yourself" basis because, as you said, that was the most stable way to deal with it. In the last year or two though I just let Planet CCRMA handle most of the builds. If I'm working on an application or testing one (JAMin, Ardour2, k3b) I'll build it from scratch but otherwise my system has been rock solid even with updates from the Planet. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

if it really is Gnome dependent, I insist in my thesis that configuration tools should be distro and desktop independent and I'd like to quote your signature: :-) Best regards ce

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 14:40 -0500, Jan Depner wrote: Sorry, Yes, it is. It's not a gstreamer thing though - it's a front end to asoundconf(1) which appears to have been recently developed for Ubuntu. It looks like a nice design, here's the man page. asoundconf(1) asoundconf(1) NAME asoundconf - utility to read and change the user's ALSA library configuration SYNOPSIS asoundconf is-active asoundconf get|delete PARAMETER asoundconf set PARAMETER VALUE asoundconf list DESCRIPTION asoundconf configures the ALSA library for the user. It does this by reading the values of parameters from and writing the values of parameters to the special file .asoundrc.asoundconf in the user's home directory. The .asoundrc.asoundconf file should not be edited by hand! The .asoundrc.asoundconf file only has an effect on the ALSA library if it is included by the user's .asoundrc file, also located in the user's home directory. When asoundconf is run and it finds either that the ~/.asoundrc file does not exist or that the file exists and contains the markers of the obsolete set-default-soundcard program then asoundconf adds the required inclusion statement to ~/.asoundrc; otherwise asoundconf does not change ~/.asoundrc. Hence, if you want to disable control of ALSA library configuration parameters by asoundconf then simply comment out this inclusion statement but do not delete the ~/.asoundrc file. (It is OK for ~/.asoundrc to be an empty file.) WARNING This program is under development. Its features will change without notice and without preservation of backward compatibility, except insofar as they are put to use by other components of the Debian and/or Ubuntu operating systems. (As of this writing the Ubuntu developers have plans to use asoundconf for setting the value of defaults.pcm.card from the system sound preferences menu.) FILES ~/.asoundrc user-specific ALSA library configuration file ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf file containing asoundconf-managed parameter settings AUTHOR This program was written by Martin Pitt <martin.pitt(a)ubuntu.com> for Ubuntu. 30 Sep 2005 asoundconf(1)

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 23:53 +0200, Christoph Eckert wrote: Yes, it's just a python script, I couldn't easily find the source other than in a .deb so here it is. Lee

Hi Lee, since I used SuSE and Mandrake, I dislike distro dependent configuration tools. Creating distro independent configuration tools makes more users benefit from the efforts, make them more versatile and user friendly. Setting up a DSL connection in Mandrake 10 with DrakConf was a pain, and as I used vi it was very simple. So I wonder if a distro independent GUI pppoe config tool was a bad idea? The same for configuring modems and other networking devices. I never understood where I find the config files on different distros, so a cool config tool which hides the underlaying system from the user is not only convenient, it also collects the knowledge of various distro architectures in its code. A further problem is that some Distros change the defaults of software packages. I remember the times I used SuSE. KDE often misbehaved. On Gentoo, I almost get a plain KDE and many things I had to struggle with on SuSE or Mandriva are gone. alsaconf is a great helper application because it includes support for various distros so many users have benefit from it instead only the users of one distribution. I'd like to add a further argument: if we leave system configuration to the packagers, we'll see two problems: * In commercial distros, if a package is not as optimally preconfigured as it could/should be, it is unlikely that it will be improved after the release date * Even in community driven projects we often see that packages that are not optimally preconfigured don't get fixed for a long time, maybe because the responsive packager has little time or even interest in doing it Please note that these points are not a personal complaint at all. I'm very happy with my Gentoo box. But when it comes to "Jeo Average" I think we can still improve the usability of current systems. Best regards ce

On 4/2/06, Dave Robillard <drobilla(a)connect.carleton.ca> wrote: Google is doing something like this with Google Research: an individual submits a question that will require some research, and submits a dollar amount that they are willing to pay to have the question answered. I would gladly pay to have config files, bash scripts, etc. written by someone knowledgeable to save me time. -- Josh Lawrence http://www.hardbop200.com