'Splain please re: mixer, alsa, pulseaudio and tvtime??

William Case billlinux at rogers.com
Fri Jul 24 21:02:54 UTC 2009


Thanks Mikkel;

On Fri, 2009-07-24 at 13:52 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> William Case wrote:
> > Hi;
> > 
> > My problem is not yet with tvtime but my question trail starts there.
> > 
> > tvtime has been upgraded to use alsa for sound rather than OSS.  To do
> > that I need to re-set  <option name="MixerDevice" value="default/Line"/>
> > to something like mixer="DEVICE[:CH]" e.g hw:0/CD; where DEVICE = hw:0
> > and [:CH] = /CD.
> > 
> > ls /dev/mixer no longer exists.  Where does tvtime find DEVICE and where
> > do I find DEVICE?  How do I know it is the new name of the mixer?
> > 
> > Which channel [:CH] do I use?  Is it from the same list as tvtime.xml
> > suggests for OSS or is it a different list?  Given that I have an
> > internal sound card on a PCIe bus how would I go about deducing which
> > channels to try first?
> > 
> You can run amixer scontrols to get a list of simple mixer control
> names. (running amixer controls will give the long names.) You can
> also get information by running amixer info. You can also run
> aplay -l or aplay -L to get a list of sound cards.

The question is more complex than that.  TVTime now has two mixer
options: OSS and Alsa.  The OSS channel names correspond to a list
supplied by tvtime.xml and to the list in alsamixer.  For Alsa I have
two choices of protocol or formulations to define the mixer and channel
used, either a)<option name="MixerDevice" value="default/Line"/> or b)
<option name="MixerDevice" value=<DEVICE[:CH]".  On my machine tvtime
seems to accept b) only.

I have only been able to find "Line" or "CD" suggested as possible
channels [:CH] for the alsa formulation.  Note the intial letter
capitalization of the channel name in Alsa versus the all lower case in
OSS.

So, can I use the same channel names, with a capitalized first letter,
as are listed for OSS or is there a new list of channel names that only
applies to Alsa?

The second part of the question I was asking was what channels do I want
to choose.  I have a lot of info here about what each of the channels is
*supposed* to do.  But I have received so much conflicting advice, and
tried so many possible combinations, I wanted to start fresh being able
to think through for myself what the settings should be.  The various
guis I have all seem to confuse the issue(s) rather than clarify.  The
fact that I have a PCIe bus with internal sound seems to greatly confuse
the issue and outdates much of the google information I have found.

In the end, this all may be a bug caused by faulty or outdated drivers.
But first I would like to work my way through to a solid conclusion
before being castigated by maintainers for not knowing what I am talking
about.

-- 
Regards Bill
Fedora 11, Gnome 2.26.3
Evo.2.26.3, Emacs 22.3.1




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