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[edit] Debian sound configuration

[edit] How to get sound working

The sound system has low level drivers (ALSA) and daemons above them that figure out which program should get access first. Today (late 2004 Sarge) things are in transition to using alsa and jack for really quality sound without the problems of the past.

[edit] What to install

I advise you to use wajig to install packages.

alsa-base       ALSA driver configuration files
alsa-modules    ALSA driver modules
alsa-oss        ALSA OSS-compatibility library
alsa-source     ALSA driver sources
alsa-utils     ALSA utilities
alsamixergui   graphical soundcard mixer for ALSA soundcard driver
alsaplayer     PCM player designed for ALSA
alsaplayer-com PCM player designed for ALSA (common files)
alsaplayer-gtk PCM player designed for ALSA (GTK version)alsaplayer-jack PCM player designed for ALSA (jack output module)
alsaplayer-oss PCM player designed for ALSA (OSS output module)
snd-gtk-alsa Sound file editor (GTK+ user interface)
vlc-plugin-alsa ALSA audio output plugin for VLC
alsaplayer-jack PCM player designed for ALSA (jack output module)
jack Rip and encode CDs with one command
jackd JACK Audio Connection Kit (server and example clients)
sysv-rc-conf SysV init runlevel configuration tool for the shell

You will also need to get firmware for later kernels depending on your card. Do not buy cards that need binary-firmware (even for Windoze computers - as they will later get used for Linux), instead only buy cards that have open specifications so the alsa folks can provide you with GPL drivers.

Go to http://www.alsa-project.org/ and on the main page you will see where you can download and build the latest firmware.

The alsa-firmware package contains firmware for the following brands of cards:

• aica_firmware
• asihpi
• digiface_firmware
• digiface_firmware_rev11
• ea
• emagic
• emu
• ess
• korg
• mixart
• multiface_firmware
• multiface_firmware_rev11
• pcxhr
• sb16
• turtlebeach
• vx
• yamaha

become root and unpack the tar package.

Enter the directory and execute these lines:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

[edit] What to config

run

lspci | grep Audio

This should tell you what audio card you have.

If your sound card is not already built into the kernel -

Get module-assistant and run it and select the audio card from the list (you can fix an error here by running dpkg-reconfigure alsa-source)

You will need to run

sysv-rc-conf

and turn on runlevels 2-3-4-5 for alsa and alsa-utils

You can try sicking the following in .bash_profile

jack -d alsa &

>> This fails to work all the time right now - let me know or update this page with details if you get Jack working well under KDE (3.2 right now)

You will want to run

[edit] Testing

run

 alsaconf

Then run

alsactl store

then run

speaker-test

In KDE (3.2 for now) set sound system to use ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound architecture)

[edit] Lenny setup

I have the following script in the .kde/Autostart folder

killall jackd
killall timidity
jackd -d alsa &
timidity -iA -Oj &

timidity still hangs once in a while so you might need to re run it.