FreeBSD and snd_hdspe last-ditch attempt

Ian Smith smithi at nimnet.asn.au
Wed Jan 23 04:38:20 UTC 2013


On Tue, 22 Jan 2013, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
 > Cc: FreeBSD quest <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>

 > Hi :)

Hi Ralf,

I've been following this saga for a while, with interest but no specific 
knowledge of your gear nor how you intend to use it.  All I can comment 
on is the way you're going about reporting and debugging your issues.

I'm not sure repeating these in questions@ will be much use if you can't 
get answers in multimedia@, but I'll leave that alone for now.  I know 
you're new to FreeBSD from Linux and can't know what advice might be 
useful and what may be wild goose chases, harder to tell in questions@

 > I can use Opera to play YouTube by the analog IOs of the HDSPe AIO sound
 > card. I can use Jack with OSS and play a WAV by Audacity and by Audacious and
 > I also can hear ZynAddSubFX. All of them only use the 2 analog IOs.
 > 
 > If I test VLC with OSS and /dev/dsp or /dev/dsp* (* is for 0 to 7), it
 > doesn't work.

What you're not telling people, now at least, is some of the basics from 
sound(4), ie which hints and sysctls you have set, for example how many 
channels and vchans you have enabled, which /dev/dsp* actually exist now 
(showing with 'ls -l /dev/dsp*' rather than telling), and how thoroughly 
you've taken the advice in sound(4) re setup and debugging, like setting 
sysctl hw.snd.verbose to 4 and reporting 'cat /dev/sndstat' results - 
this will be voluminous I'm sure, but will be needed by whoever is going 
to look at this.  I suggest gathering all the necessary information in 
one place and submitting a PR, if you can't get direct help on lists.

 > I don't know how to use Gnome Music Player Client. It's asking for an ominous
 > host, it's seemingly not the name of the machine.
 > 
 > cat file > /dev/dsp is mentioned in the handbook, but it doesn't work. ALSA
 > completely isn't available.
 > 
 > Is there nobody able to help? Are there no correct instructions what to do?
 > Is anybody else using snd_hdspe besides the coder and me?

I assume you've read what little there is in snd_hdspe(4) and the great 
deal that there is in sound(4) and are now well familiar with it, though 
your messages don't particularly indicate such familiarity.  I realise 
that you're an audio professional, but being a new card with few if any 
other users you may have to do a fair bit of digging, like inspecting 
/sys/dev/sound/pci/hdspe* and playing around with hw.snd tunables.

This is a new driver, first appearing in FreeBSD 10 :) according to 
snd_hdspe(4).  I don't know when it was merged to 9 or what level of 
testing it's had in the field, but I have to assume you've already 
discussed your issues with its author, Ruslan Bukin <br at bsdpad.com> ?

Sorry I can't offer anything more concrete, and good luck.

cheers, Ian


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