[ltp] No sound on T41 (working!)

[Colin Bennett]

Yay! It's working.

Thanks for the help, guys. I think it was a combination of turning up
the volume with the hardware buttons, and using Rob's alsa config.

It turns out that the modem in the T41 shows up as an ALSA sound device
(snd_intel8x0m). I guess that's how winmodems work, either that or it's
because it's a voice modem.

But that makes my sound card show up as the second card for alsa, so I
have to tell programs to use the second card. For instance, I'm using
KDE, so in the Control Center/Sound System/Hardware setup, I checked
override device location, and entered "hw:1,0" to force KDE to ARTS to
use the second ALSA card.

One problem remains, however. And this is because the audio card is a
cheap piece of shiznit. There is no hardware PCM mixing so only one
program can open the sound card at a time. I searched around and found
that using the ALSA plugin 'dmix' does software mixing at the expense
of some quality. I tried to set up dmix but couldn't get it to work. (I
got the PCM device working, but programs like xmms couldn't find the
mixer device after that for some reason.)

Currently my workaround is to use arts (the KDE sound daemon) sound
output for all programs, which allows them to share the device. 

The latency with arts is *awful* however, at least with some programs.
XMMS takes for *ever* to seek (.5 sec or so, but that feels like
forever when it takes <50ms with alsa). KDE-specific programs seem to
work much better with arts. The kaboodle media player seeks much better
than XMMS does, perhaps the xmms-kde plugin is not utililzing the arts
interface completely with respect to flushing bufferes or something.

I think I'll try JACK (the JACK Audio Connection Kit) and see if it can
do the PCM mixing for me, allowing me to use JACK output for programs
which should provide vastly better latency.

Thanks again!
Colin

=====
Colin D. Bennett
colin_d_bennett@yahoo.com

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