Audio devices

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 11:41:02AM -0500, phil wrote:
> I seem to have lost most of a weekend to the exploration of Linux 
> distributions for AMD 64.  :-)  First impressions have me leaning 
> toward SuSE 10 as the best combination of usability/simplicity and 
> flexibility.  (I'm using Debian on my older system, but the Debian AMD 
> 64 web site sounded like more of an adventure than I was prepared 
> for...but, who knows, I've got a spare partition for experimenting.)  
> The "serious" stuff that I wanted the new box for all seems to be going 
> ahead OK, like database, development tools, general desktop utilities, 
> server applications....

The only reason debian amd64 is not official yet, is that the ftp
archive is going through some major restructuring and they don't want to
add an architecture to it while doing the reorganization.  In the future
mirrors will generally only carry some architectures rather than
everything the way most of them currently do.  It is simply getting to
be much too big.

> Sound is hanging me up some, however.  I had hoped to migrate my music 
> toys over to this system as well and use such things as Rosegarden and 
> Arbour.  To support that, I was intending to attach a USB "soundcard" 
> that I've been using on a Macintosh.  It's a Tascam US-122 with line 
> in/out, MIDI, and connections for studio microphones.  There is also a 
> soundcard on the motherboard (ASUS A8N-E with Realtek AC97).
> 
> If I don't configure the USB box, audio works OK. (Once I discovered 
> that the default KDE CD player, KsCD, doesn't produce any sound, that 
> is!  Kaffeine is fine.)  If I try to configure the US-122, I get no 
> output.  What I see is that the device is on the USB hardware list as 
> "Tascam Unclassified Device".  The correct driver seems to be 
> associated with it: snd-usb-usx2y, which is also aliased to snd-card-0 
> according to a modprobe sound configuration file I tripped over.  I 
> discovered a site that discussed usx2yloader  and firmware mods and, as 
> best as I can understand it, that's all in place.  This is all 
> happening with ALSA selected as the sound system.

Does that usb sound device work with any linux system you have tried it
on?  If yes, then which driver and which kernel version was that with?

Just from a quick search it appears that the driver in 2.6.8 was very
very broken for that device.  Maybe a newer kernel with a newer alsa has
the full fix.  I don't see any complaints past late 2004/early 2005 on
the alsa developer list.  Of course 2.6.8 was out by then and is what
debian shipped in Sarge.  Debian has newer kernels in testing and sid
however which have newer alsa versions.

There have been some issues of amd64 finding some 64bit bugs on existing
code, including in kernel drivers.

> (Of course, if I boot my Windows XP partition, the Tascam just 
> works...sigh.)

Well sure, they probably gave you a driver for it.

> Any suggestions of other places I should be looking?

Len Sorensen
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