[Alsa-user] after a few weeks of attempted troubleshooting, snd-mia is *still* giving me trouble

[jxn s. <kau...@gm...>]

Howdy,
I was having trouble with my Echo Mia-Midi sound card and snd-mia module=20
before, but eventually got it working (thanks in much part to this mailing=
=20
list) with a few hiccups/quirks which I assumed I'd be able to tackle=20
myself, but I was quite wrong.

Anyway, I think the alsa problems are the cause of the general instability=
=20
of my audio players, dispite the fact that this machine is a *mission=20
critical* audio-player that needs to be playing audio 24/7, unattended (yet=
,=20
I can't leave it for half an hour with out any & every audio player=20
crashing, and I can't get it to start up ready to play audio)...

Anyway, here's the issue, as it happens:

When I boot up my computer (gentoo with alsa-lib-1.0.9b + firmware + driver=
s=20
+ tools + utils, etc, etc; support not compiled into the kernel (is it=20
possible to compile snd-mia into any kernel? I haven't seen the option=20
available even on mm-* kernels))... back to the problem... when I boot up m=
y=20
computer, the normal init scripts appear to go successfully, including the=
=20
script for "alsasound", which outputs as follows:

However, none of my apps play audio... amarok complains that the device is=
=20
busy when I use the xine engine, and when I use the gstreamer engine, it=20
complains that "could not get/set settings from/on resource". Alsaplayer=20
says: "Unable to install hw params:", and so on... However...
If I restart the init script, I get the following output:
* Storing ALSA Mixer Levels ... [ ok ]
* Unloading ALSA ... [ ok ]
* Unloading ALSA modules ... [ ok ]
* Loading ALSA modules ...
* Loading: snd-card-0 ... [ ok ]
* Loading: snd-card-1 ... [ ok ]
* Loading: snd-seq ... [ ok ]
* Loading: snd-seq-midi ... [ ok ]
* Restoring Mixer Levels ...
/usr/sbin/alsactl: set_controls:1088: snd_ctl_open error: No such file or=
=20
directory [ !! ]

...but some of the audio players begin to think that they're playing audio,=
=20
though they don't....

Finally, if I restart the script for a third time, I get the following:
* Loading ALSA modules ...
* Loading: snd-card-0 ... [ ok ]
* Loading: snd-card-1 ... [ ok ]
* Restoring Mixer Levels ... [ ok ]

And sound works well, though, as I said, my players tend to crash easily (I=
=20
believe on certain files)...

anyway, I *need * to get this machine running reliably, FAST... I cannot=20
stress how important it is to make it more reliable and to make it so that =
I=20
do not have to restart the demon 2 extra times after boot!!!

Thank you so much for your help,
jackson