[CM] snd, Alsa and RME Multichannel

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> I recently purchased a RME HDSP PCMCIA card with a Multiface and
> managed to get the new driver of Paul Davis loaded. aplay works with
> 2-chanel wav files. I tried to check playback of Multichannel aiff
> Files with snd but got errors about unavailable devices (I can't give
> you the printout of the error message in the moment as I don't have
> the box right now). [MUNCH]
>
> 1. If snd works with alsa does it use oss or can it access alsa directly?

I can access alsa directly.

> 2. If so, how can that be specified (maybe it has to get compiled into snd)?

Snd has to be configured with --with-alsa=yes and alsa 0.9 has
to be correctly installed.

> 3. I heard that snd works multichannel under alsa. If so, does it use
> oss for that (meaning I have to load some of the oss modules of
> alsa)?

Multichannel (and mono and stereo) works under alsa in snd
only with interleaved soundcards. The RME is non-interleaved,
so you will get an error when the alsa code in snd tries to
open the soundcard (look at the error log to see what you are
getting). In the meanwhile you could use oss emulation for
playback (ie: compile snd with --with-alsa=no), but I think
that will not work with multichannel playback. Obviously I
have to get into "snd alsa programming mode" and fix this...

-- Fernando