[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Alsa on IT2006 beta

[From: Steve Landers]

On 22/06/2006, at 7:10 PM, Frantisek Dufka wrote:

> Steve Landers wrote:
>
>> Yes - I looked there. Nothing that stands out as being an alsa  
>> driver - snd_hwdep and snd_rawmidi being the closest but neither  
>> appears to provide the functionality of the inbuilt Alsa drivers  
>> in IT2005 nor the Alsa support referred to in the Maemo  
>> documentation.  And, unfortunately, I cannot find any  
>> documentation on how to use these modules.
>
> Tha basic support is in kernel
> Nokia770-22:~# cat /proc/asound/version
> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.11rc2 (Wed Jan  
> 04 08:57:20 2006 UTC).
> and with the rest in modules I think it is the same functionality  
> as it was in IT2005 (i.e almost none). What exactly did work in  
> IT2005 out of box? I thought alsa is not working yet for the  
> internal audio and people should use gstreamer or esd deamon for  
> that as the audio chip is used only by DSP (via gstreamer)  
> directly. Am I wrong? Was there really alsa to DSP audio driver in  
> kernel in IT2005?

I'll answer that question in a few hours when I rebuild the Maemo 1.1  
scratchbox and try building and running aplayer.  I've just reflashed  
to 1.1 (oh how I miss IT2006 already :)) and note that the /proc/ 
asounds directory has a subdir card0 with a symlink Dummy ->  card0.   
Inside card0 is a device file id which just returns "dummy". So at  
this stage I'm not sure if that indicates there is or isn't an Alsa  
driver present.

What I do know is that the documentation (http://www.maemo.org/ 
platform/docs/multimedia/multimedia_architecture.html) explicitly  
states that Alsa is supported and seems to discourage one from using  
ESD.

I've looked into Gstreamer but quickly got bogged down in the  
complexity and it isn't obvious if it is even possible to get it  
working in the way I need (basically, playing midi notes - ideally  
with soundfont support) without developing a plugin. I could go down  
the SDL path as an alternative but given I use a library that  
supports Alsa (Fluidsynth) and the Maemo multimedia documentation  
says that it supports Alsa then I'm naive enough to believe it should  
be possible :)

Don't get me wrong - I love the 770 and think that it is a great  
device. I'm just a bit frustrated at the moment with the quality of  
the available documentation (I can live with missing documentation, I  
find incorrect documentation a little harder to deal with).

In any case, I appreciate your input.

Steve