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Old 07-10-2017, 10:52 AM   #21
Jack Winter
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Join Date: Aug 2007
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Originally Posted by brainwreck View Post
In years of off/on use of linux, I never came across a down to earth guide on configuring and tinkering with alsa. Anyone come across anything? I haven't seen alsa covered in admin books; the few articles on it are indecipherable; lot's of broken up bits and pieces around the net on it.
Regarding configuration of the hardware, that's a pretty sad story..

For instance Intel HDA is a specification, and manufacturers are free to implement devices in many different ways. What is supposed to happen is that the BIOS puts this information into the ACPI tables, so that the OS knows where to route audio, where the opamps are, what to name inputs/outputs, etc. Of course the BIOS hardly ever does this, in fact it often lies, so things go wrong. On windows the driver is mostly composed of this info and not much else

There are ALSA configuration tools to manipulate the routing and name things properly, etc. Once the problems have been fixed for a specific hardware implementation (motherboard/chipset/soundcard), then a so called "quirk" can be added to ALSA, so that it knows what to do with that specific Intel HDA in the future. But this is a moving target

On USB we are more or less stuck with audio class 2.0 compliant soundcards, no onboard DSP, etc.

There are a smattering of devices that do have a driver that actually works well, and from what I understand firewire interfaces work very well (low latency) when they work. There seems to also be a new trend of putting networking into highend cards, so possibly we'll gain access to more advanced features through a browser.

Regarding configuring the higher ALSA layer, the best I found are the actual ALSA docs like: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc and http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...m_plugins.html
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Last edited by Jack Winter; 07-10-2017 at 11:18 AM.
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