[PlanetCCRMA] Basic Newbie stuff

[Niels Mayer]

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano
<nando at ccrma.stanford.edu> wrote:
> He is a (see subject) "basic newbie" so compiling and trying out new
> programs should be a second step to getting sound working, the
> envy24control utility should be enough to set things up initially...

It should be, but this is Linux, Fedora and prosumer audio ... so
that's an unlikely expectation that should be dispelled quickly :-) ,
at least until a nice "AV Spin" of Fedora becomes available that is
configured to not go silent as soon as it sees a soundcard with 10
channels of output, 12 channels of input, and  using  S32_LE format
instead of S16_LE like everything expects (Incidentally one such
potential distro, AV Linux, will be including mudita24 as replacement
for envy24control:
http://www.remastersys.com/forums/index.php?topic=934.msg5335 ).

So yes, doing things the simple way is always advisable, unless some
of the bugs in alsa-tools prevent this simple way. For example,
envy24control crashing right out of the box if you say, "envy24control
-c M66" instead of using a numeric card id, like with "old style" ALSA
naming. see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=alsa-tools&product=Fedora
.  Most of these issues have been fixed in mudita24's "envy24control"
.  Everything I said applies to envy24control since mudita24 is just
an improved version of that program with a lot of bugfixes.

As I mentioned there's a binary as well
http://nielsmayer.com/envy24control/mudita24-1.0.3.x86_64.tgz (unpack
with tar xvzf mudita24-1.0.3.x86_64.tgz).

Also, mudita24 has an extra 1010LT feature over envy24control that can
be useful for newbie debugging -- display of spdif input/clock status
aka:

$ amixer -c M66 cget numid=50,iface=MIXER,name='Delta IEC958 Input Status'

-- Niels
http://nielsmayer.com