[LAD] ALSA Headaches, …. erm, Headphones

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:22 AM, Richard Spindler
<richard.spindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Create a simple and friendly software tool, that guides a not so
> technical user to the process of identifying and testing all the
> different mixer configurations, and asks the right question to test
> whether all of them work as intended. The tool would collect that
> information, along with an identifier that allows to recognize the
> model of the laptop used, and send that information back to the ALSA
> developers. Those could then integrate this information into the
> project, and whenever a future user starts ALSA on an identical
> machine, it would already know the perfect configuration for this
> machines individual mixer control setup.

The ALSA developers are already working on something like this.  Your analysis
of the Intel HDA support situation is right on.  The BIOS is supposed
to tell the
generic HDA driver how the system is wired but many don't and AFAICT it works
on the other OS because the .inf file from the vendor's audio driver
tells the device
independent HDA driver how to configure the codec.  Your tool could
parse the .inf
file from the vendor driver and generate an identical codec graph.

In the meantime please post a one line summary of the problem and the PCI id of
your audio device to the alsa-devel mailing list.  Your issue is
common and usually
very easy to fix.

Lee