Hello,
Thanks to all those who made Alsa, its great and has helped me achieve one of my goals
- AC3 / DTS output via the digital SPDIF on my system! This means I can playback DVD's
using xine with full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.
I've seen lots of people asking if this is possible with my particular chipset and how
to do it, so I thought I'd post the info to the group, and I have one small question
at then end!
I have a Shuttle SN41G2 system running Gentoo Linux. The motherboard has an nforce 2
chipset and an intel8xO based sound chip. I have also purchased the extra spdif add-on
giving 4 digital connections (1 optical in, 1 optical out, 1 coax in and 1 coax out).
I am running with CVS alsa-driver and CVS alsa-libs, and have the following .asoundrc
(based on the one posted by Lars G in the sound card matrix). There is one small
change to the pcm value in the slave device.
pcm.nforce-hw {
type hw
card 0
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "nforce"
}
#0,0 is analogue out (i.e. headphone socket on the shuttle), and 0,1 is spdif out.
pcm.nforce {
type dmix
ipc_key 1234
slave {
pcm "hw:0,1"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
}
ctl.nforce-hw {
type hw
card 0
}
Everything else is as per the intel8xO sound card matrix.
HINTS
-----
o) KDE
By default KDE uses artsd to mix sounds, but since we are using the dmix plugin this
is no longer necessery. artsd locks the sound device in such a way that it blocks any
other programs from generating sound output (unless they have an artsd plugin). This
causes programs like xmms, xine and even alsaplayer to just hang.
With the above .asoundrc, you can go into KDE, load the control panel and turn off
artsd and all sounds will work fine.
o) Noise / pops and interferance with aplay and KDE.
I found that with this .asoundrc I was getting annoying pops and spikes at the end of
sound clips when played with aplay (KDE uses aplay to play sound clips such as the
login / logout wav files). The problem appeared to be with the CVS alsa-utils. I
de-installed those and then installed older ones (I used emerge in Gentoo which I
think loads version 9.2)
Question:
The only problem is with the volume settings - I don't seem to have any control over
those when using the spdif output. alsamixer doesn't have any effect and neither does
the volume controls in the individual apps (i.e. xine or xmms with alsa support).
Hope this is useful to some other people!
Chris.
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