Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:39:15 -0400 | From | "Albert Cahalan" <> | Subject | ALSA pisses me off |
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As the ALSA asoundrc documentation (not available as a man page, grrr...) tells me:
: Warning : : Neither .asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf is normally required. You should : be able to play and record sound without either (assuming your mic and : speakers are hooked up properly). If your system won't work without one, : and you are running the most current version of ALSA, you probably : should file a bug report.
Well, OK, here you go.
All I want to do is play some damn audio. All I have is a pair of USB speakers. This should be trivial; OSS sound worked perfectly.
It hasn't been reliable since the "upgrade" to ALSA. It seems I can go edit a complicated config file (alsa.conf, w/o man page) if I want to make sound work. Of course, this gets overwritten with any OS upgrade and, as noted above and obviously expected, sound should "just work" without any config file hacking.
I gather that somebody decided that USB audio should never be selected as the default. There are two obvious problems with this. The first is that there exist systems that ONLY have USB audio. The second is that, if a user adds USB audio, they probably want to use it! Plugging in a USB audio device should take over the audio, much like plugging in a set of headphones normally will. The use case may be very similar, such as when using USB headphones, or the motherboard audio may be defective.
Audio is probably the #1 most frustrating and needlessly broken thing on Linux. I haven't had it JUST WORK since we got all fancy.
Here, I'll show info and then attempt to play something appropriate.
# cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [VirMIDI ]: VirMIDI - VirMIDI Virtual MIDI Card 1 1 [Speakers ]: USB-Audio - Speakers Apple Computer, Inc. Speakers at usb-0001:10:18.0-2.2, full speed root 0 /tmp# aplay -L default:CARD=VirMIDI VirMIDI Default Audio Device null Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture) # ogg123 Wilhelm.ogg
Audio Device: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) output
Playing: Wilhelm.ogg Ogg Vorbis stream: 2 channel, 44100 Hz ALSA snd_pcm_open error: No such device Error: Cannot open device alsa.
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