Slashdot Mirror
Installing/Configuring ALSA Sound Modules In Debian
GonzoJohn writes "Linux Orbit explains how: "A very common question that comes up when trying Debian GNU/Linux is how the heck do you get Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (a.k.a. ALSA) sound modules set up properly? In this HOWTO we'll show you how to compile and install the ALSA kernel modules, and then setup things using the ALSA Debian script so that modules are automatically loaded and unloaded, and your mixer levels are saved and restored on boot up. Here are some things you'll need to have before you start this HOWTO""
Gentoo Linux has had a similar guide for months, without coverage on the front page of Slashdot. (And, if I may say so, the Gentoo way is cleaner.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but why/how is this news?
Mandrake for example..
Gentoo tends to be a 'connected distro', and tends towards people with high-speed, always-on connections. You might not like the amount of bandwidth it uses: for instance, a new minor release of KDE (3.0.3 -> 3.0.4) will consume 60 MB alone, but for many it's worth it.
It's (obviously) your call in the end as to how much it's worth to you, but Gentoo is an excellent system. It has killer package management (Portage! -- what other package manager lets you specify compile-time options?), excellent speed (GCC 3.2), and wonderful consistency and customizability.
BTW, the init scripts were crafted specifically for Gentoo; it's neither BSD nor System V.
Umm... this how-to appears to be very well written, in fact much better written then the lack of documentation that comes with the package, the last time i setup ALSA it took me about 48 hours mainly because no where was it clearly explained how to do things, it was read as much documentation as you can and try to make up the manual yourself based on what you know from the API. Essentially this how-to is now the manual
It has ALSA built in.
Compiling your own kernel additions is for experimental stuff, not stuff that has been working for years like ALSA
no, you can have a 2.4 kernel, you will just have to compile an alsa module or apt-get one
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If your interested in the init scripts, you could just read the Gentoo Init System documentation.
Pro-tools/Logic Killer:
http://ardour.sourceforge.net
VST Killer:
http://www.ladspa.org/
Asio Killer:
http://jackit.sourceforge.net/
FruityLoops Killer:
Anything
Newbies should get SuSE or Mandrake, pop in the DVD, wait for half an hour and have a full functional desktop - including office suite and loads of useful stuff preinstalled. (Try to unpack a .rar in a clean Windows install. Or try ICQ. Or IRC.)
Linux can be much easier than Windows if you choose the right distribution.
I'm so sick of FUD like this:
having working sound support in the first install should be a priority for Linux distributions
All major commercial distributions (hell, even RedHat which is by far the worst of all) had sound-support out of the box for years.
Yet the Wintrolls just don't get it.
(P.S. Yes, debian has it's uses, too. apt-get is great, the stability is excellent. Yet it's not really for users not willing to invest some time installing.)
This is misleading and inaccurate.
ALSA does not cause "random crashes of the
machine if you have an onboard sound card."
There have been some buggy chipsets that
can lead to lockups without some driver
workarounds. I have one in my laptop - a NeoMagic 256 A/V (ugh). Takashi Iwai of the ALSA project
invested a great deal of time in responding to
my problem reports and fixed the problems I was
having with that chip.
If you're having problems with ALSA and lockups, it's specific to your soundcard. Try a more recent version of ALSA, and if it's still broken,contact the developers. They want to fix it, but they don't have access to every piece of hardware under the sun.
--PW
I purchased the commercial OSS drivers about two years ago (maybe less, i don't remember) and believe that they are all around better than the alsa drivers. Don't get me wrong, the alsa drivers are great, but they don't seem to give me the same edge over fine tuning my sound as OSS. Also, i figure that for $30 bucks, those damned drivers had better be superior to ALSA (free as in speech/beer) in every respect. The installation is far superior to anything alsa has to offer. Unzip the tarball, run 'oss-install' and point-n-click your way to sound. I still feel as though I made the right decision. I have a feeling, however, that soon, i will regret purchasing them. (of course, at the time i purchased them, they were pretty much the only decent set of sound drivers available).
I don't completely agree with you here. I do agrre in that Debian's efforts to ease the road for the newbies are pretty lackluster, to say the least. However, maybe I'm just insensitive, but I can't say I care too much about that. For power users, there isn't anything close to Debian --anything that I've tried, anyway. That includes several other Linux flavors, Windows, Solaris and MacOS pre-X (I'm really interested to try FreeBSD, Gentoo and MacOS X, but alas, no time).
But that's a feature, not a bug! That's precisely what allows me to build full-featured Debian routers out of old 486 boxes with 240 MB hard disks (no kidding).
You just have to read a little. By now I'm sure you found out that in Debian you don't edit modules.conf directly, but put files in /etc/modutils, which update-modules assemble into a modules.conf file. It's cleaner, easier to maintain, it avoids one package from clobbering other package's modules. If only you manage to get used to it, you'll probably find that there's usually a very good reason behind most of Debian's oddities.
Debian will seldom touch your hand-edited files, if you know where and how to write them. I know, that can annoy a great deal out of an old timer used to edit conf files freely --but then again, Debian's scheme of things allows you to install and deinstall things, and even to upgrade from slink to potato to woody, without worrying about breaking anything. I think that's a good reason to deviate from traditional setups.
Yeah, that is a problem. Again, I don't care much: I use FVWM, and the few GTK/Gnome apps that I need (Mozilla, Evolution, XChat, the Gimp) I installed from Woody and work flawlessly. But I do see someone getting frustrated from the lack of Gnome2 and/or KDE3. I hope someone that actually gets bothered enough by this will go help the guys packaging that stuff --they've been doing it for a long time, and a little bit of help probably won't hurt.
If you've got the right analog equipment, an SB Live! Platinum is actually rather good for what you're after.
The Live! is very well supported in Linux as far as my experience goes, and its analog inputs are pretty good. I don't have any hard figures, but going from my old vinyl to 192kbit MP3 (through LAME) compares *very* favorably to going from CD to same quality MP3 (Perl Jam - Vitalogy on vinyl and CD)
Also, the original Live! Platinum is available for around US$50 if you shop around.
(of course, all this is useless if you're looking for archive quality recording, but moving from your 'El-Cheapo Pretends-To-Be-Soundblaster-Compatible' it'd be an order of magnitde better)
try the delta audio series by M-audio.
I use them under win for making tracks very good quality/price ratio.
also have it working under linux but havent done much with it as i c cant find a cubae/logic/protools type program for linux yet
If you're really quite serious about A/D quality, look into using an external box for the task. Midiman makes a couple of different, well-performing 24-bit models, and they occasionally pop up on Ebay. Or, you could pick up a nice pawnshop/Ebay DAT or Minidisc deck, and use that.
Not that you need 24 bits to transcribe vinyl, but it does help ensure that you'll not run out of headroom. Later in the process, you can normalize the audio and truncate or dither it down to 16, while preserving every nuance of the album's pops, ticks, and surface hiss.
Plug a box like this into a sound card's SP/DIF input. The stupider, cheaper, more DSP-phobic cards will generally be more likely to do a bit-perfect job of this, such as the $12 Zoltrix Nighingale or other CMI8738-based cards. Along the same lines, do try to avoid anything branded Creative Labs, mmkay? They've got bad habits like irrevocable resampling, and are noisy throughout (even when only doing strictly "digital" things with SP/DIF IO).
That said:
I used to play engineer for a streamed talk radio show. Equipment was limited to the gear in a small project recording studio, none of which was intended for broadcast use, aside from the scrap-built Linux box running liveice and lame.
Since this box needed a sound card, I drove over to the nearest white-box OEM parts dealer and started looking. I picked a YMF744-based (XG) PCI card from AOpen, similar to this one, based primarily on the component count: It was the only card under $50 which was not branded Creative, and appeared to have reasonable analog filter stages and signal paths.
It turns out that this card, along with other Yamaha XG cards, has superb support under ALSA, and that the quality of the converters is not bad.
The control of the card was such that I was able to calibrate it to the output meters on the Tascam console, and monitor the program via digital loopback through its own DAC at 0 gain.
I could then push a button on the console, and switch between monitoring the signal in its original analog state, or after it'd been through a ADC->DAC stage without worrying that varying levels would skew my perception.
In the (somewhat noisy) enviroment I was in, I could hear no difference in overall quality with or without the Aopen card in-line. This cheap sound card was, in a word, transparent, at least for my purposes. Which is all I can ask of any sound card.
ALSA made this easy, but I suspect I'd have trouble doing things so precisely under other operating systems.
But I've noticed that not all XG-based cards are made the same. Hoontech sells, or at least sold a year or two ago, some expensive studio-oriented monstrosities which doubtless sound beautiful. On the other end of things, I've heard some laptops with XG chips which sounded horrible.
Lately, I've been recording my 2-year-old daughter's various noises with an SB Live 5.1. The results are OK, but nothing like what I remember hearing in the studio. I could blame the card's on-board mic preamp or the sound of my apartment, but I fear that shoddy AD plays at least as large a role in the matter.
Good luck.
Kid-proof tablet..
For those interested in setting up alsa, note that the modules options file in the article is only valid for alsa 0.9 up to rc3
/etc/modules.conf files by hand or use our alsa-driver/utils/module-options script which does this job. Please, notice that 'snd_' prefix is not equal to 'snd-' prefix (module name) which is left unchanged.
The line
options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=4 snd_device_mode=0660 snd_device_gid=29 snd_device_uid=0
wont work with newer versions (for instance Sid has 0.9rc5, an so I guess Testing will have it soon too), because (from www.alsa-project.org)
We have changed the kernel module symbol names (module parameter names). We removed prefix 'snd_'. Please, update your
That means you need to change the previous line into something like:
options snd major=116 cards_limit=4 device_mode=0660 device_gid=29 device_uid=0
Hope this helps
!
^_^