[PlanetCCRMA] Re: [Agnula-Users] Re: [Agnula-Developers] Re: [PlanetCCRMA] default .asoundrc file?

[Mark Knecht]

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 10:17, Andrea Glorioso wrote:
> Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano <nando at ccrma.Stanford.EDU> writes:
> 
> > Is it really necessary to have one? So far I have never needed one. What
> > would it provide that the default settings don't? I know that, for
> > example, you can create stereo "devices" over a multichannel card but
> > those are specialized setups, I would say. 
> 
> The only commonly-request  setup that  comes to my  mind is  the  dmix
> virtual device - although you can obtain the same effect with jack.
> 
> Aside from this, what  I had in  mind was simply a complete  .asoundrc
> with descriptive  comments  for  each  entry.    Something that  could
> probably live into the documentation, probably.
> 
> In any case,  I'm interested and open  to  suggestions on what  a good
> .asoundrc file  could be - but nothing  more than that, i.e.   in this
> moment   we  don't  have  the  manpower   to study   all  the possible
> combinations  .asoundrc  directives can  take and  come   out  with an
> all-encompassing solution (supposing there is one).
> 
> bye,
> 
> andrea
> 

Hi,
   I am not subscribed to any of the AGNULA lists so I have removed them
from this response. Post this through on your response, if any.

   OK, so if .asoundrc is useless, then why does every Alsa Sound Card
matrix page tell you to do something like the following?

pcm.hdsp {
   type hw
   card 0
}

ctl.hdsp {
   type hw
   card 0
}

My system doesn't seem to care if these exist or not. I can change the
name of them to pcm.mark and it doesn't make any difference as far as I
can tell. Some programs seem to allow me to talk to the name hdsp or mark,
but some don't. I think a standard .asoundrc file could say why we do this
in a comment if it wanted to.

In the case of my RME cards it appears a lot of Alsa programs don't query
the card to find out it requires a period of 2, so the programs don't work.
If I tell the program to talk to plughw:1,0 then the plughw plugin does
a format conversion and allows the program to work. Maybe there's a better
way to do this in .asoundrc? I haven't tried, mostly because I don't want
to spend time scouring the web looking for clues.

I'm certainly not saying this is an important topic, and no one is being 
forced to contribute. More that if users have tricks to share, and want to
share, then a standard file with lots of info all commented out would not
hurt anything and might be useful to some...

Besides, everything I try after reading the Alsa documentation pages fails.
Assuming my experience is anywhere near normal, then there are at least a 
few others out there experiencing similar problems.

Thanks,
Mark