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AlsaTips

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ALSA is a new digital sound architecture for linux and is meant to replace the OSS modules. It is now shipped with the 2.6.x kernel series. First, here are some related pages.

Contents

Alsa layers

Alsa consists of several layers:

  1. The kernel modules - the kernel modules provide the basic infrastructure of Alsa and the hardware drivers. Programs have the ability to talk directly to the alsa kernel modules. This is discouraged though, since alsa-lib makes life a whole lot easier for the app developer (and for the user). Alsa provides an OSS emulation layer to keep legacy OSS apps working. Two different mechanisms are available for that. The OSS compatibility modules (OSSEmulation) and the aoss script from the alsa-oss package. All alsa modules start with a prefix of either "snd-" or "snd_". The ALSA kernel modules provide a rich interface via /proc/asound
  2. alsa-lib - is a userspace library that provides a level of abstraction over the kernel modules. For audio devices there's the "pcm" and "ctl" abstractions. For midi, the "seq" interface is avaliable. See the alsa-lib docs for more details.

    • pcm: the pcm interface is very flexible and allows the definition of virtual and hardware devices via a relatively easy to understand configuration file (\~/.asoundrc, /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf). You can for example use plugis as pcm devices. One notable plugin is the DmixPlugin plugin that makes software mixing available to soundcards without hardware mixing. This means you can play multiple audio streams with a soundcard that doesn't usually allow that. And it is transparent for the Application as long as it uses alsa-lib [or even for OSS apps]. See this wiki for more docs on the dmix and ther plugins and for documentation on how to edit the .asoundrc..
    • ctl: this is the control interface which is used to adjust volumes and other control functions the soundcard offers. Use the program alsamixer to see what you can adjust in your soundcard
    • seq: the seq interface is used for midi applications. Its design makes stuff like Hubi's Loopback device unnecessary since it is easily possible to connect alsa seq clients to each other using tools like aconnect or "aconnectgui" or "alsa-patch-bay"
  3. user space programs - there's some user space programs provided like the aforementioned aconnect. An incomplete List [please fill missing in]:

    • aplay - playback sounds to pcm devices
    • arecord - record sounds from pcm devices into wav files
    • alsamixer - the mixer program
    • aconnect - the midi connecter
    • aoss - a script t wrap OSS apps
    • alsactl - save/restore mixer state
    • amidi - a tool to write/read from raw midi ports..

So summing it up. ALSA is the superior sound architecture compared to OSS. Lack of drivers is a problem though. But Linux is gaining momentum, so maybe hardware producers start to be more generous on card documentation. If you want to use serious Low-Latency recording with Linux and ALSA, you need to patch your kernel with Low-Latency patches and install jackd. Then rock solid operation is very much possible. There's a cool jack hard disk recorder called ardour. There's several native alsa-sequencers like muse and rosegarden. There's all kinds of softsynths for jack like SpiralModularSynth and amSynth... Check the linux audio pages for more. Hope to have cleared up some stuff. Feel free to modify improve and correct my little text here..

Getting ALSA to start at system boot with Red Hat 7.3

After successfully installing ALSA, I was trying to get it to start automatically at boot time, using '/etc/init.d/alsasound' service start script (put there by the ALSA installation) but found I had 2 problems, one was that the format of the sound modules in the ALSA HOWThs is different from what the alsasound startup script expects, second that grep -E was not working as (I) expected. For some reason it was not correctly working with \^ (start of line marker) in its regexp used to match the ALSA lines in '/etc/modules.conf'. What I had to do was alter one line in the alsasound script to fix both problems.

Here is the line as it was

   grep -E "^space:*aliasspace:+snd-card-digit:" | \

and as it is now

   grep -E "alnum:*space:+snd-card-digit:$" | \

And here is my '/etc/module.conf' (ALSA portion, my sound card is an ESS SOLO1 which uses the snd-es1938 module)

   # ALSA setup of ESS SOLO-1
   alias char-major-116 snd
   alias snd-card-0 snd-es1938
   # OSS/Free setup
   alias char-major-14 soundcore
   alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
   alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
   alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
   alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
   alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Using the second OSS playback channel on some cards

Some cards (es1370, es1371, etc) have a second pcm playback device that the OSS drivers traditionally access as /dev/dsp1 (major 14, minor 19). With ALSA this second pcm output is accessable with oss compatability enabled as /dev/adsp (major 14, minor 12). This device is very useful to get a nonblocking artsd or esd sound daemon. Many distros will not create the /dev/adsp device for you so you will have to execute "cd /dev; mknod adsp c 14 12". If you are using devfs this device will be automaticaly created by devfsd.

Using two cards as one

JoernNettingsmeier posted an .asoundrc to linux-audio-users to use two cards as one.

Order of Installation

First install alsa-driver. After that alsa-library and finally the other packages. Detailed installation instruction can be found in the INSTALL file (included in each package). See Quick Install.

Unresolved Symbols

Patrick Shirkey has collected some information about fixing Unresolved Symbols

The .asoundrc file

The .asoundrc file allows more sophisticated control over your audio card and some very useful applications will not work at all without it. A system wide version can be installed as /etc/asound.conf and a more specific version stored in your home directory as \$HOME/.asoundrc. Until now, it has been a bit of a black art getting the details correct.

A brief example

Put the following in a file in your home directory named .asoundrc:

   pcm.myfirstcard {
       type hw
       card 0
   }    
   pcm.!default myfirstcard

Change of module directory tree

2002-02-26

From Dave Andruczyk: For those not so well versed in ALSA if you install 0.9beta 11 over a previous release, make sure you DELETE the /lib/modules/YOUR_KERNEL/misc/snd* modules. The beta 11 version reorganizes the ALSA kernel drivers in a much better and cleaner format, under /lib/modules/YOUR_KERNEL/kernel/sound/ ALSO (I didn't check the docs), but if your module was "snd-card-xxxxx" its now snd-xxxxx. Thus the older snd-card-emu10k1, is now snd-emu10k1. So edit your /etc/modules.conf as appropriate and things should be just fine. Make sure to run "depmod -a" after modifying /etc/modules.conf, or after deleting/adding kernel modules to your modules tree under /lib/modules/YOUR_KERNEL Aside from that beta 11 works wonderfully on my box (Mandrake 8.1).

Some Sample devfsd.conf Entries

For those of you who use ALSA on the 2.4 kernel, you may also use devfs, which is a dynamic device filesystem which allows for the creation of device entries on the fly. However, this can cause problems when moving from OSS to ALSA on a 2.4 devfs system. Here are some example entries which may help (these come from my own setup):

   REGISTER  snd/.*  PERMISSIONS root.games 666
   REGISTER  sound/.* PERMISSIONS root.games 666
   LOOKUP    sound/audio EXECUTE mknod -m 666 sound/audio c 14 4
   LOOKUP    sound/dsp EXECUTE mknod -m 666 sound/dsp c 14 3
   LOOKUP    dsp  EXECUTE mknod -m 666 dsp c 14 3
   REGISTER  sound/mixer MKOLDCOMPAT

Some notes on dealing with /dev from Takashi (1)

If you use devfs interface for /dev, you cannot use the 2nd or later card with the original sound_core.c on 2.4 kernel. if you use proc interface for /dev/snd, it works anyway. You can have multiple soundcard with devfs using a patched sound_core.c:

   patch /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound_core <  wget -q -O - \  http://hypermail.idiosynkrasia.net/linux-kernel/archived/2001/week50/att-0144/01-sound_core.c.dif 

also if you build the kernel without devfs support and use 2nd or later cards, then you'll get annoying error messages, even if you use proc interface. (it's harmless, though.)

Incorrect advice... should have been "chmod 666 /dev/snd/*". And to compliment this insecure setting the directory itself needs to be "chmod 755 /dev/snd".

This may not work because often, on a non-devfs enabled system, /dev/snd is symlinked to /proc/asound/dev where the permission cannot be manually modified. The most reliable way to change the owner/permission is to pass a proper module option to snd.o when ALSA starts up in /etc/modules.conf with a line similar to...

   options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=4 \
   snd_device_mode=0660 snd_device_gid=29 snd_device_uid=0

Some notes on dealing with /proc from Takashi (2)

Writing a proc file is really easy. you can simply copy the code from one of the driver. But the proc info, such as usb descriptor dump, is hardware (driver) dependent. It's up to the driver author. so I cannot summarize the "general" usage for such files. Ok, let me comment major proc files...

   /proc/asound/cards (RO)
    the list of registered cards

   /proc/asound/version (RO)
    the version and date the driver was built

   /proc/asound/devices (RO)
    the list of registered ALSA devices (major=116)

   /proc/asound/hwdep (RO)
    the list of hwdep (hardware dependent) controls

   /proc/asound/meminfo (RO)
    memory usage information
           this proc file appears only when you build the alsa drivers
           with memory debug (or full) option so the file shows the
           currently allocated memories on kernel space.

   /proc/asound/pcm (RO)
    the list of allocated pcm streams

   /proc/asound/dev
    the directory containing device files.  device files
    are created dynamically.
    in the case without devfs, this directory is usually
    linked to /dev/snd

   /proc/asound/oss
    the directory containing info about oss emulation

   /proc/asound/seq
    the directory containing info about sequencer

   /proc/asound/cardX (X = 0-7)
    the card-specific directory

Device files under /proc/asound/dev

Generally the file is named as aaaCxDy, where aaa is the service name, x the card number (0-7) and y the device number (0-).

   controlC?  control devices (i.e. mixer, etc.)
   hwC?D?     hwdep devices
   midiC?D?   rawmidi devices
   pcmC?D?p   pcm playback devices
   pcmC?D?c   pcm capture devices
   seq        sequencer device
   timer      timer device

Ínfo about OSS emulation

The contents of the files under this directory are changed dynamically. when no oss emulation modules (snd-pcm-oss, snd-mixer-oss) are loaded, no pcm nor mixer devices will be listed.

   /proc/asound/oss/devices (RO)
    the list of devices already registered

   /proc/asound/oss/sndstat (RO)
    /dev/sndstat compatible list

Card-specific proc files

   id (RO)
    the id string of the card

   ac97#? (RO)
    AC97 codec information

   ac97#?regs (RO)
    (printable) register dump

   midi? (RO)
    the current status of input/output on the
    rawmidi device

   pcm?p
    the directory status of the given pcm playback stream
   pcm?c
    the directory status of the given pcm capture stream

PCM stream information

   pcm??/info (RO)
    the pcm stream general info (card, device, name, etc.)

   pcm??/oss (RO)
    oss emulation info (shown only when the pcm is opened
    as an oss device).

   pcm??/sub?
    the substream information directory

   pcm??/sub?/info (RO)
    the pcm substream general info (card, device, name, etc.)

   pcm??/sub?/status (RO)
    the current status of the given pcm substream
    (status, position, delay, tick time, etc.)

   pcm??/sub?/hw_params (RO)
    hw_params set-up on the substream
    (buffer size, format, etc.)

   pcm??/sub?/sw_params (RO)
    sw_params set-up on the substream
    (threshold, etc.)

   pcm??/sub?/prealloc (RW)
    the number of pre-allocated buffer size in kb.
    you can specify the buffer size by writing to this proc file:

   # echo 128 > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/prealloc

    to allocate 128kbyte for playback, substream #0, stream #0
    on the card #0.

To find all the options for the alsa modules on your machine run this script...

   modinfo $(modprobe -l snd-*) | cat > ~/modinfo

2002-08-15

snd_* settings for the OPL3-SA in the Toshiba SP490XCDT and similar. Look up the current sound settings in the BIOS setup:

Compile ALSA modules as a debian package

Some notes on compiling ALSA modules for Debian (you may need to do ./configure after unzipping ALSA), another example and yet another howto on the same subject.

Share a single card with multiple applications

NEWS FLASH! Jaroslav's dmix plugin comes to the rescue! See the DmixPlugin wiki page. Since ALSA 0.9.1 it has been possible to use the dmix plugin to share a single device with multiple applications. This was a puzzling omission from previous ALSA releases, and a big thanks go out to Jaroslav for implementing this. Please note that the 'share' plugin, as indicated in various places, is useless for this task. The ALSA documentation includes an 'Unknown Reference' to this software mixer ('smix', or 'pcm_mix') plugin, and should probably be updated with the information that this plugin is not part of the current ALSA tree, and will not be without a lot of work. This plugin has been replaced in functionality with 'dmix'

I will provide details on how to configure this plugin as part of the 'default' ALSA sound path when I figure out how to do it. Here's the best documentation of dmix that exists at the moment:

This is how you set your card to use the dmix plugin by default:

   pcm.!default {
       type plug
       slave.pcm "dmix:CARD=0,DEVICE=0,RATE=48000"
   }

Removing all ALSA modules

   #!/bin/sh
   awk '/^snd/||/^sound/&&($3==0){system("rmmod " $1)}' /proc/modules /proc/modules /proc/modules

A note for those running RedHat

Since RedHat doesn't use devfs, you will need to run ./snddevices during install, no matter which version you are installing. The problem I was having is that atempting to run alsamixer resulted in the error:

   alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: \
    No such file or directory

so if you're on another distro and having the above problem you may want to give ./snddevices a try. And where do I find snddevices? http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/alsa/alsa-driver/snddevices.in

How to set a certain output as default playback device

Have alook at the output of cat /proc/asound/devices.

     1:       : sequencer
     0: [0- 0]: ctl
     8: [0- 0]: raw midi
    18: [0- 2]: digital audio playback
    17: [0- 1]: digital audio playback
    16: [0- 0]: digital audio playback
    24: [0- 0]: digital audio capture
    33:       : timer

On my system there's 3 playback devices. If i want to make the third the default i just add this line to my \~/.asoundrc [counting starts at 0]:

   defaults.pcm.device 2

This selects hw:0,2 as the defaul pcm device.. I figure this might make trouble when trying to record. But then jut use hw:0,0 as the capture device [the setup of your software should allow that]. It works here.

Selecting a device for OSS emu

You have to override the definition of pcm.dsp0 and ctl.dsp0 like this \~/.asoundrc and then use the aoss script from the alsa-oss package:

   pcm.dsp0 {
       type hw
       card 0
       device 2
   }
   ctl.mixer0 {
       type hw
       card 0
   }

The above pcm definition makes the OSS emu use the 2nd device on the first card [which is in my case the digital out]

Enabling 5+1 outputs on cards with line-out, mic-in and line-in jacks

I thought this is the place where i can share this, if not please move it! Ok to the point I have Realtek ALC655/AC'97 card on my gigabyte mobo, the card has 3 stereo-jacks - out, mic-in and line-in. The problem was that there is no app for making mic-in and line-in behave like outputs (this card is 5+1 channels) so that I can plug 6 speakers.. i made alot of asking and searching w/o an answer even on the ALSA list.. the solution was prety damn easy. I just had to use "\<" and ">" for :

   Mic As Center/LFE
   Line-In As Surround

instead of arrows, with which u normaly increase the volume... Below is a description how to do this manualy with amixer (u may need this too to include in scripts).. Ok here is it :

   #amixer | grep -A 3 As

   Simple mixer control 'Line-In As Surround',0
    Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
    Playback channels: Mono
    Mono: Playback [off]
   --
   Simple mixer control 'Mic As Center/LFE',0
    Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
    Playback channels: Mono
    Mono: Playback [off]
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    #amixer cset iface=MIXER,name='Line-In As Surround',index=0 95%
    numid=37,iface=MIXER,name='Line-In As Surround'
    ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw---,values=1
    : values=on
    #amixer cset iface=MIXER,name='Mic As Center/LFE',index=0 95%
    numid=38,iface=MIXER,name='Mic As Center/LFE'
    ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw---,values=1
    : values=on
   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   #amixer | grep -A 3 As
    Simple mixer control 'Line-In As Surround',0
    Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
    Playback channels: Mono
    Mono: Playback [on]
   --
   Simple mixer control 'Mic As Center/LFE',0
    Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
    Playback channels: Mono
    Mono: Playback [on]
    -----

Enabling single output outputs on cards with line-out,mic-in and line-in jacks

This is pretty much the reverse of the above post where you want a single output (line-out) to have the full range out sound, not splitting the sound across all the potential outputs. Useful if you only use your machine with headphones.

Tips to Enable Recording

Sometimes the alsamixer settings needed to control recording are not obvious, and recording may not be working, recording noise or "snow." Before complaining that the driver is broken (as I just about did), try this sensible recipe from Kai Vehmanen, author of the excellent ecasound system. In one console, issue the command:

   arecord -r 48000 -c 1 | hexdump

In another console, issue the command:

   alsamixer

In the first console, you should see bytes scrolling by. If they are very repetitive, they are probably noise or something you don't want. In the mixer window, change various mixer settings that are likely to affect the recording. In my case, pressing the Insert key to toggle off IEC958 capture was all I needed to get mic input working correctly. Then, changing Capture volume fine-tuned the input. In the first console window, I would press Ctrl-C and then arecord to a file, and then aplay the result to hear what it sounded like.

Fighting disturbed sound

OK so you get ALSA up and running, but the sound is disturbed. For instance, playing mono 8bit sound is OK, but stereo is just messed up. Or you always get some humming background noise. Leaving alone things you can do with the driver itself (another parameters etc) here is what you can try:

  1. check for shared interrupts for you sound card (cat /proc/interrupts). In the theory, it shouldn't matter whether a sound card shares an IRQ. In practice, it does. Check if you can give another IRQ via BIOS setup, or driver parameter
  2. if sound disturbance is somehow related to moving windows or cursor, look here [1] for explanation/possible cure
  3. Try another PCI slot (also helps against shared IRQ)
  4. Turn off "PCI burst" in BIOS, try to set PCI latency to higher values (i.e. to 64 from 32 etc)
  5. To minimise humming background noise, try another PCI slot. Use different outlets for PC and speakers. Check that both are properly grounded.
  6. Use PCI sound card instead of the on-board one.
  7. Recording with sox (often done through the provided "rec" utility) sometimes gives problem, try arecord (alsa-utils package) or brec (bplay package) instead.

Another thing you can try:

Reload the alsa sound modules. Attention: Most often the /etc/init.d/alsa script won't do that. You have to use the script alsasound which comes with the alsa packages in that case: Simply run /etc/init.d/alsasound restart and in two cases (cmipci and cs46xx) it worked for me. Try the very same if recording gives you distortions or clippings (in my case SPDIF recording).

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Category: Troubleshooting