[Alsa-user] aplayor alsalib has problem with device selection by name

[Marcus B. <Mar...@ep...>]

Hi.
I'm temporarily not on this list and do not have a properly configured 
mail client at hands, so please excuse this probably malformed mail and 
please do also reply directly to me as the mailinglist archive isn't 
very interactive...

Somehow parts of my alsa installation quitted its service. I do (by 
others) have a CMI8738 based card which I mainly use through 
OSS-Emulation snd-pcm-oss. This still works fine, also alsamixer and 
amixer do, but I recently noticed that aplay wouldn't play through spdif 
anymore. I usually played AC3 and DTS RIFF/WAVE-Files through aplay this 
way:

aplay -D spdif <wavfile>

But now it returns:
--> ALSA lib pcm.c:1513:(snd_pcm_open_conf) Invalid type for PCM spdif 
definition
--> aplay: main:446: audio open error: Invalid argument

I did several reinstalls (only alsa and both alsa+distri) which all came 
to the same results only varying in linenumbers depending on source 
version. To be exact I tested hopefully all combinations of:

2.4.8-26mdk, 2.4.17
egcs-1.1.2, gcc-2.95.3, gcc-3.01
Mandrake {7.2,8.1}
alsa-0.9.0beta{6,8,10}

The funny thing is that it worked fine for several months, and I do have 
no clue what might be wrong this time. I first supposed some problem 
which alsa.conf parsing or an outdated alsa.conf, but this can be 
excluded since I also did a complete reinstall on an empty partition. 
The only things I manipulated manually are:

alsa-driver configured with "--with-cards=cmipci" to speed up compilation
/etc/modules.conf:
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-cmipci
alias snd-card-1 snd-pcm-oss
options snd-pcm-oss snd_dsp_map=2      # direct OSS apps to spdif device

cu Marcus