Re: [Alsa-user] Report on audiotrak usb cards & question

[Clemens L. <cl...@la...>]

Dan Armak wrote:
> I tried the various Audiotrak (www.audiotrak.net) cards (luckily I found a
> store that let me bring my laptop and experiment). I used the 0.9.0_rc8
> drivers with a 2.4.20-based kernel and the uhci usb driver, with twin intel
> 82801BA/BAM usb controllers. All the audiotrak cards are advertised as
> supporting the usb audio v1.0 spec.
>
> The main report is that the Maya5.1 (which I purchased) works perfectly out of
> the box. I only tested the first two analog outputs though (ie not the whole
> 5.1 scheme) as i don't have 6 speakers or hardware with optical in/out.

If 5.1 is only available via AC3, it won't work because the snd-usb-audio
driver currently doesn't support this audio format.

> The Optoplay, listed as '?' on the matrix, seemed to work OK, the drivers
> loaded but - no sound output. This is the same as the problem someone
> reported a coulpe of months ago - it only works at 24 bits, and while the
> driver loads, apps only try to open the device @ 16 bits, which doesn't work.

This is only for OSS apps. ALSA programs (e.g. aplay) probably would have
worked.

> I also tried the Maya7.1, and it somehow managed to hang my usb bus! I didn't
> have the time or desire to do extensive testing, so I don't know what exactly
> happened, but after I inserted it, the usb mouse died, removing and
> reinserting usb devices didn't help, and there were no log messages about it
> all. Had to reboot to fix things.

Strange. Looks like a hardware problem, but difficult to tell without
further testing.

> Now to my question. Now that I have this nice new usb card, how do I play
> cdaudio via it? I'm using a laptop and presumably the cd drive connects
> straight to the laptop's internal sound card, which I've had quite enough of.
> How can I go around that?

You have to rip the audio data from the CD and move it to the sound card.
cdda2wav has an option for this, or you could pipe the output of
cdparanoia to aplay. (Beware, both are command-line programs. :)


HTH
Clemens