[PlanetCCRMA] Pd + PulseAudio?

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 20:10 -0400, Peter Kirn wrote:
> Okay... I may have spoken too soon. I think Neils may be right and,
> despite the Fedora distro advice (and even what I had heard from Paul
> Davis), disabling PulseAudio may be the only sure-fire solution
> 
> I just can't get Pd-extended to properly talk to audio. Sometimes it
> works, more often it doesn't. 

Is this using pd + jack?

> Sometimes quitting applications that use
> PulseAudio works, sometimes it doesn't.
> 
> Most notably, starting qjackctl first and setting JACK as the audio
> system often doesn't work.

What distro do you have installed? (fc11? fc12?)

What error message do you get from jack? (press the "Messages" button to
see what jack is saying). 

Which jack are you running? ("rpm -q jack-audio-connection-kit" to
know). 

If you are using fc11 or fc12 and the Planet CCRMA jack you should be
able to use jack without problems. In both cases jack negotiates with
pulseaudio the release of the soundcard. Are you setting the proper
"Interface" value for the card in the "Setup" panel of qjackctl? (it
should _not_ be "(default)"). 

> I either get a sync error / cannot open audio interface, or ...
> nothing. (No error, just no sound, literally.)

Could you paste here the complete error messages you get from jack? It
is very difficult to know what is happening without the verbatim error
messages. 

A good start would be to check what soundcards the system sees by doing
a "cat /proc/asound/cards". Is the first card the one you want to use?
If so, you could try, from a command line, to do this:

jackd -d alsa -d hw:0

That is the simplest invocation and it should work. You should see
something printed out that tells you jack is getting the card from
pulseaudio (it is best to use the name of the card instead of "0", the
name is between "[]" in the output of the cat above, say "hw:M66" for a
Delta 66 card). If it does not work please copy the exact errors you
see. 

-- Fernando


> I definitely suspect PulseAudio, as I see this behavior consistently
> on PA systems.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> A good way to temporarily disable PulseAudio to ensure that's the
> issue before I remove it completely, just to test this?
> 
> Peter
> 
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:29 PM, Niels Mayer <nielsmayer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Forgot to mention gnome-volume-control -- don't use it as it expects
> > pulseaudio.
> > Instead, create a custom launcher on the panel that runs alsamixer with the
> > chosen device e.g.
> > "xterm -geometry 160x24 +sb -e alsamixer -c SB" or "envy24control"
> > "echomixer" "hdspmixer" "cspctl" etc from package 'alsa-tools'.
> > Niels
> > http://nielsmayer.com
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 7:27 PM, sonictwin <ruhtranayr at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Everything worked perfectly and now I can play music while jackd is
> >> running.
> >>
> >> However,
> >>
> >> gnome-volume-control is not to be found in gnome-panel,
> >>
> >> running 'gnome-volume-control' via alt+f2 i get the popup "Waiting for
> >> sound
> >> system to respond"
> >>
> >> and via terminal:
> >>
> >> $ gnome-volume-control
> >>
> >> ** (gnome-volume-control:15392): WARNING **: Connection failed,
> >> reconnecting...
> >>
> >> Time to search the web for a different volume-control app
> >>
> >> Cheers!