[CM] snd: cannot set hardware parameters for default

[Kjetil S. Matheussen]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 10:15 +0100, andersvi@extern.uio.no wrote:
>> Indeed, there has been something weird with snd and sndplay for some
>> time.
>>
>> Ive only tested jack-enabled versions.  Since some time near spring
>> 2007, neither recent self-built jack-enabled versions or disted
>> versions from planetccrma (tested with snd-utils rpms for fc6 or fc7
>> from june 8th and december 7th.)  function without jack running.
>>
>> Trying to use any of them without jack makes errors which resemble the
>> one Funny Zen described.
>
> Yep.
>
> My wish list for snd would include something like dropping the alsa
> driver and using something else, higher level of course. What? Hmmm,
> pulseaudio is being used in f8 but I know nothing about it. One idea
> that occurred to me a while ago is to try to see if libecasound can be
>

Yes, but I think the audio in sndlib is excellent already, I have
used it for providing sound to both ceres and mammut, and
recommended it as a lightweight alternative to portaudio many times.
The alsa backend isn't allways working very well though, but running
alsa with oss emulation solves that problem just fine. The
trick is just not to use the --with-alsa commandline when compiling
snd. Thats how snd-ls is configured. Not that the alsa backend
in snd is bad programmed, you probably did an excellent job,
but the alsa api is horrible, and snd isn't the only program
with not allways working alsa backend. Wine, juce, pd, mplayer,
from the top of my head, are others programs who have or have had
similar problems.



> used to provide the audio i/o services. Ecasound is a very good command
> line player (and "digital audio workstation"), properly supports alsa
> and jack and I have found it to be very stable and reliable...

Snd's jack backend is tuned quite a lot for snd, plus that
it runs with sched_fifo priority and also runs its own watchdog,
so I'm not so sure about replacing the jack part. But well. :-)