Independent ALSA and linux audio support site

HowTo Asynchronous Playback

From the ALSA wiki

Jump to: navigation, search


File:Merge-arrows.gif There is another article called Asynchronous_Playback_(Howto) with a very similar content. Please be bold an merge the two pages!


WARNING: Asynchronous Playback is part of a not safe subset of ALSA for some Linux distributions that use pulse audio like Ubuntu. Please consider using safer ways on your programs like polling if you are going to use Pulse Audio.

Since none of the existing documentation was thorough enough for me to understand what was really going on in ALSA at times, I'm going to write up this partial document on how I got ALSA output to work in my application, and what I think is going on, describing it to my best abilities. Hopefully, some Developer With A Clue will extend or fix this document.

Comments by me in this file are italic, and probably means something wasn't and still isn't quite obvious to me. Fore-mentioned developers are welcome to enlighten me.

This document describes just one of the methods for using ALSA. Specifically, I'm going to use regular writes here, and use asynchronous notification to find out when I can write to the ALSA buffer. Besides asynchronous notification, you can also simply poll like you would with any other file descriptor. And besides regular writes, you can also mmap the buffer and write directly to memory. I'm not going to cover these, though, but you can find an example of it all in the alsa-lib API reference here: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/_2test_2pcm_8c-example.html

Contents

Setting up the device

The first step is naturally to open the sound device.

/* This holds the error code returned */
int err;

/* Our device handle */
snd_pcm_t *pcm_handle = NULL;

/* The device name */
const char *device_name = "default";

/* Open the device */
err = snd_pcm_open (&pcm_handle, device_name, SND_PCM_STREAM_PLAYBACK, 0);

/* Error check */
if (err < 0) {
    fprintf (stderr, "cannot open audio device %s (%s)\n", 
        device_name, snd_strerror (err));
    pcm_handle = NULL;
    return;
}

This should look fairly straight-forward. We need a handle, a variable holding the return value of our calls and a device name to tell ALSA which device to open for us. The device name is a standard ALSA device identifier you've probably encountered already, such as "hw:0,0" to indicate the first device. The value "default" we use here opens up either the first available device or whatever the default is, probably set in the system or user's asoundrc file.

Most functions in alsa-lib return a negative error code if the operation failed, like most regular system calls. Also (quite) similar is the snd_strerror function, which turns an error code in a human-readable string, like the strerror function.

The third parameter to snd_pcm_open, by the way, indicates the direction of the stream. The only other option here is SND_PCM_STREAM_CAPTURE, which obviously captures audio instead of playing it. The final parameter to snd_pcm_open is the mode in which to open the device. This can be set to SND_PCM_NONBLOCK if you'd like to initialize the device in non-blocking mode, meaning calls to snd_pcm_writei or snd_pcm_writen will not block until space is available in the buffer, but instead immediately return with error code EAGAIN to indicate the write failed, just like any other system call you might be familiar with.

Can this be OR'd? And what exactly is the SND_PCM_ASYNC flag for? The asynchronous notification worked without this flag, in fact, it broke when I tried to set it.


In code examples beyond this section, I will leave out error checking for brevity, and simply tell you how to clean up instead. In the example above the ALSA code was simply part of another application, which could still function if ALSA for some reason broke during execution. This is why I set pcm_handle to NULL, it is used throughout the application to indicate if ALSA is initialized. If your application is simple player or whatever, you'd probably exit at that point.

To kick off the lame excuse I have for my lazyness, after we're finished with the device, we simply close it:

snd_pcm_close (pcm_handle);

Setting up parameters on the device

Hardware parameters

Before we can actually feed something to this device handle we just created, we have to tell it what we're feeding. We do this using hardware parameters, which are kept in a structure of type snd_pcm_hw_params_t. First, we allocate this structure, and then we fill it with information from our device's current state:

snd_pcm_hw_params_t *hw_params;

snd_pcm_hw_params_malloc (&hw_params);
snd_pcm_hw_params_any (pcm_handle, hw_params);

If this all goes well, we can now set hardware parameters! Setting a subset of hardware parameters is almost mandatory:

unsigned int rrate = 44100;

snd_pcm_hw_params_set_access (pcm_handle, hw_params, SND_PCM_ACCESS_RW_INTERLEAVED);
snd_pcm_hw_params_set_format (pcm_handle, hw_params, SND_PCM_FORMAT_S16_LE);
snd_pcm_hw_params_set_rate_near (pcm_handle, hw_params, &rrate, NULL);
snd_pcm_hw_params_set_channels (pcm_handle, hw_params, 2);

snd_pcm_hw_params_set_access is used to set the transfer mode I've been talking about at the start of this document. There are two types of transfer modes:

Besides this, there are also two ways to represent the data transfered, interleaved and non-interleaved. If the stream you're playing is mono, this won't make a difference. In all other cases, interleaved means the data is transfered in individual frames, where each frame is composed of a single sample from each channel. Non-interleaved means data is transfered in periods, where each period is composed of a chunk of samples from each channel.


To visualize the case above, where we have a 16-bit stereo sound stream:

where each character represents a byte in the buffer, and padding should of course be ignored (it's just for clarity).

\ Note that I emphasized might in the non-interleaved case. The size of the chunks depends on the period size hardware parameter, which you can adjust using snd_pcm_hw_params_set_period_size. But in most cases, you want interleaved access.

So now that we've got two transfer modes and two ways to organize our sound stream, we can conclude there's 4 options we can pass to snd_pcm_hw_params_set_access:

There's also a SND_PCM_ACCESS_MMAP_COMPLEX, which is described in the API reference as "mmap access with complex placement". Anyone care to explain how that works?


So now that we've set our access mode, we specify the sample format. There's a whole range of sample formats ALSA supports. You can find a list here: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___p_c_m.html#a70

The sample format we picked above is Signed 16-bit Little-Endian samples. A pretty common sample format, and it should be obvious how these parameters are named.


After that, we set the sample rate of our stream, in Hz. Note that the functions we use is called snd_pcm_hw_params_set_rate_near, meaning the actual sample rate set may not match the sample rate we specify. For this reason the function takes a pointer to an unsigned integer, so it can change the value of our rrate variable to reflect the actual rate set. There's also a function snd_pcm_hw_params_set_rate, which doesn't take a pointer, and will try to set the sample rate to the exact rate you specify. It's likely that this will fail on different sound devices though.

The last parameter to snd_pcm_hw_params_set_rate_near, 'dir', is documented as "Sub unit direction". What does that mean? Leaving it set to NULL seems to be safe.


From pcm.c:

Exact value is \<,=,> the returned one following dir (-1,0,1)

So NULL means, try exact value.


How we tell our device how many channels our stream contains should be obvious now from the code above.


Two other hardware parameters which might be helpful to mention are buffer size and period size:

/* These values are pretty small, might be useful in
   situations where latency is a dirty word. */
snd_pcm_uframes_t buffer_size = 1024;
snd_pcm_uframes_t period_size = 64;

snd_pcm_hw_params_set_buffer_size_near (pcm_handle, hw_params, &buffer_size);
snd_pcm_hw_params_set_period_size_near (pcm_handle, hw_params, &period_size, NULL);

Both of these take the size in bytes. The period size is what I described earlier in the section about interleaved and non-interleaved. Besides specifying the size in bytes you can also specify them in nanoseconds using the hardware parameters buffer_time and period_time.

There's a whole lot of other hardware variables you can alter, but that'd be too much information to cover here. Take a look at the API reference if you're interested: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___p_c_m___h_w___params.html


Now that we're done setting all our hardware parameters, we have to apply them back to the device. This is easy, really:

snd_pcm_hw_params (pcm_handle, hw_params);

Of course, we also have to clean up the structure behind our back. Simply free it up like this:

snd_pcm_hw_params_free (hw_params);

Software parameters

Besides hardware parameters, there are also software parameters. There's a lot less of 'em, but in our case, we have to deal with them. Setting them is almost exactly the same as hardware parameters, except with, you guessed it, an snd_pcm_sw_params_t structure instead:

snd_pcm_sw_params_t *sw_params;

snd_pcm_sw_params_malloc (&sw_params);
snd_pcm_sw_params_current (pcm_handle, sw_params);

Software parameters are optional in most cases, but in this case we're going to use asynchronous notification to let ALSA tell us when we need to fill the buffer with some new data. And in this case, software parameters are handy, because they allow us to set a threshold for when that happens and also when ALSA starts actually playing something:

snd_pcm_sw_params_set_start_threshold(pcm_handle, sw_params, buffer_size - period_size);
snd_pcm_sw_params_set_avail_min(pcm_handle, sw_params, period_size);

set_start_threshold tells ALSA when to start playing. In this case, we tell it to wait until our buffer is almost full.

set_avail_min tells ALSA when to notify us. In this case, we want to be able to write at least period_size samples to the buffer without blocking.

I'm not quite sure if my explanation of this is right, might need some reviewing. It's also not a very extensive explanation.

Just like hardware parameters, other available software parameters are covered in the API reference: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/_2test_2pcm_8c-example.html


And just like hardware parameters, we have to apply the changes we made back to the device using this simple piece of code:

snd_pcm_sw_params(pcm_handle, sw_params)

And because we don't want to cause any leaks, at least not in memory, we clean up:

snd_pcm_sw_params_free (sw_params);

Preparing the device

Now we've set up our device, but we still can't write to it. There's one last step we have to take: prepare the device:

snd_pcm_prepare (pcm_handle);

Now we can write! Before we start playback it's a good idea to write an initial chunk of sound to the device:

snd_pcm_writei (pcm_handle, MyBuffer, 2 * period_size);

First of all, we have been using the interleaved format throughout this example as you've seen above. If you were using the non-interleaved format, you'd use the snd_pcm_writen function instead. Other than that, it works exactly the same.

MyBuffer in the above piece of code is a pointer to wherever the data is you want to write to the device. and the last parameter is the size in bytes of the data to write.

Two times the period size seems to be a good initial write size? Going below this results in a buffer under-run (broken pipe error on any subsequent function calls) and going over it seems to trigger "file descriptor in a bad state" errors.

Also note, that the write functions actually return something useful beside error codes as well: if the write succeeds, the length of the data actually written to the device is returned. You probably want to check that this is the same size as the data you intended to send.


So now it's time to actually get asynchronous! The way ALSA notifies us, is through a callback. We tell it which callback simply by calling a function:

snd_async_handler_t *pcm_callback;

snd_async_add_pcm_handler(&pcm_callback, pcm_handle, MyCallback, NULL)

The first parameter to this function is simply a pointer to a handle. This handle is also a parameter to our callback, as I will show you later on. The second parameter is our device handle again, the third our callback function and the fourth is a void pointer to any user data you may want to pass to the callback. I'll just leave it set to NULL in this example.

I'll show how the callback is implemented in the next section.

You can disable the callback at any time by calling the snd_async_del_handler function, like this:

snd_async_del_handler (pcm_callback);

However, it is not necessary to clean up the callback. It will be cleaned up when the device is closed anyways.


So when we've been through all this trouble to set up our device, we want to actually start playing. This is another easy part:

snd_pcm_start(pcm_handle);

Now you can do pretty much anything else in your application. If there's not much else to do, there's always the sleep system call.

At any time, you can stop playback by calling any of these two functions:

snd_pcm_drop(pcm_handle);

Which immediately stops playback, dropping any frames still left in the buffer, or:

snd_pcm_drain(pcm_handle);

Which 'drains' the buffer, stopping after all remaining frames in the buffer have finished playing.

For other operations related to playback or the device structure, again, see the API reference: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___p_c_m.html

The callback function

To prevent buffer under-runs, we need to refill the buffer every so often, adding new stream data to it to keep the sound playing smoothly. This is where our callback comes in.

The callback has the following signature:

void MyCallback(snd_async_handler_t *pcm_callback);

What happens in the callback is fairly simple; this is simply and roughly what it will look like:

void MyCallback(snd_async_handler_t *pcm_callback)
{
        snd_pcm_t *pcm_handle = snd_async_handler_get_pcm(pcm_callback);
        snd_pcm_sframes_t avail;
        int err;

        avail = snd_pcm_avail_update(pcm_handle);
        while (avail >= period_size) {
                snd_pcm_writei(pcm_handle, MyBuffer, period_size);
                avail = snd_pcm_avail_update(handle);
        }
}

Matt S - http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___p_c_m.html#a53 suggests snd_pcm_delay should be used instead of snd_pcm_avail_update? Psy - http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___p_c_m.html#g012e8b999070e72ab23514f25e7d6482 clearly says that snd_pcm_avail_update has to be called before writing to the device takes place, in order to update the r/w-pointer.

Note: The callback will be called by ALSA inside a signal handler, so be careful how you access data in other parts of your program and don't do any malloc/free type stuff.

As you can see, the snd_async_handler_t structure is passed to the callback. This is a really handy structure, because the first thing we do is grab the associated device handle from it. If you had any user data associated with it, you can get to it like this:

void *private_data = snd_async_handler_get_callback_private(pcm_callback);

Where 'void *' would of course be whatever type the original data you passed to the snd_async_add_pcm_handler function was. In our case, however, this would simply return NULL.

Another new function we see here is snd_pcm_avail_update. This function takes a device handle, and returns the amount of available bytes that can be written to the device. As you can see, we use this in our loop too keep writing chunks to the buffer until it's full.

That is basically all there is to the callback. Note however, that this example does not include error checking, which is a good idea of course. Occasionally, you may have to restore from a buffer under-run, in case the computer was caught up in some other process and didn't get to calling your callback. Whenever this happens, the first operation you perform on the device, in this case snd_pcm_avail_update, will return -EPIPE (a 'Broken Pipe' error). You can restore from this by calling the snd_pcm_prepare function again.


User:Stéphan K.: I just now noticed how often I mentioned myself in this document. Perhaps it would've been better writing this from another perspective... oh well. :)

Retrieved from "http://alsa.opensrc.org/HowTo_Asynchronous_Playback"

Category: Howto