USB sound on Alix running Voyage

I thought that using a USB sound card with Linux would be easy, just plug and play, but I was wrong, it seems. Plug­ging in the Ter­ra­tec Aureon Dual USB (ID: 0ccd:0077) that I bought ren­de­red a pro­mi­sing out­put from dmesg and lsusb, and lsmod sho­wed that even rele­vant modu­les were loa­ded. The pro­blem was that mpd and other pro­grams did not find any way to actu­ally out­put sound to any device. They had the firm belief that my system was lac­king any sound card. Maybe I would need some sound rela­ted pac­ka­ges?

aptitude install alsa-base alsaplayer alsaplayer-text alsa-utils

## Keep snd-usb-audio from beeing loaded as first soundcard<br/> #options snd-usb-audio index=-2

# Fix from http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,4119,4166<br/>

1. Allow snd-usb-audio to be loaded as first soundcard options snd-usb-audio index=0
   
   Now I was at least able to get alsa­mixer to ack­now­ledge the mere existence of a sound rela­ted device, but alas it chose an input only device (most likely my Logi­tech webcam with microp­hone) as the default device even though it cal­led the Ter­ra­tec one default by name. Luc­kily for me the just men­tio­ned forum thread linked to a more sub­stan­tial thread descri­bing the pro­blem in more depth. I added myself and the mpd user to the audio group, to make sure that there would not be any pro­blems with per­mis­sions regar­ding the devices
   

   addgroup jadler audio addgroup mpd audio

   
   I was still unable to play anyt­hing (wit­hout expli­citly cho­sing what Alsa refers to as sound card 1). So I kept try­ing the stuff that had worked for the per­son repor­ting in the forum, cre­a­ting an /etc/asound.conf file with basi­cally the same con­tent as sug­ges­ted in the last thread refer­red to above, but chan­ging all refe­rences to hw:0 to hw:1, and from card 0 to card 1. Now mplayer works, but I still can’t get mpd to do its thing.
   Alix, Datorer, Embedded, English, Linux alix, audio group, configuration file, Debian, linux, mpd, problem, terratec aureon, usb sound card
    

   1 responses to “USB sound on Alix running Voyage”

   • 

     Nick L. EMT-P May 25th, 2011 at 14:39

     There was no need to edit alsabase.conf.

     Use the aplay –l com­mand to find out what card and device your USB DAC is, then input these values into the ALSA sec­tion of mpd.conf. hw:X,Y where X is the card num­ber and Y is the device number.

     That is, if aplay lists your USB DAC as card 0 and device 1, then your mpd.conf asla sec­tion should look like this:

     audio_output {
     type “alsa”
     name “My ALSA Device”
     device “hw:0,1”
     }

     As always, restart mpd (/etc/init.d/mpd restart) after edi­ting mpd.conf for changes to take effect.

     Reply

   
   

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