Subject: [linux-audio-user] "PDAudio-CF on Laptop with Linux" Adventures
From: Daniel Zuckerman (dzlinuxaudio_AT_hemiola.org)
Date: Thu Nov 11 2004 - 15:57:27 EET
Greetings listers.
I thought I'd share some things I discovered last night.
After spending an inordinate amount of time (not all at one sitting)
trying to figure out how to solve this problem...
~/test-alsa/ arecord -D pdaudiocf -f cd foo.wav
Recording WAVE 'foo.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz,
Stereo
arecord: pcm_read:1196: read error: Input/output error
...I made some discoveries. This started happening to me after coming
fresh to the laptop one evening, ready to transfer an old concert tape.
The PDAudio-CF having worked like a champ before, I was starting to get
nervous that something odd had happened. Turns out, after going to the
#alsa group on freenode and getting a huge amount of attention from one
kind soul, who eventually pointed me to one of the alsa list archives,
combined with something I seemed to recall reading somewhere, that the
tape was at 48k, and the PDAudio-CF doesn't do hardware sample rate
conversion.
So why I am I telling you this?
Well, for one thing, if my notes ever get deleted, I can always check
this archive. :)
But I hope to save someone else the problem.
WHAT TO DO:
So, if you get this error, and it seems out of the blue (like the thing
was *just* working!!!),
Check what the card thinks the incoming sample rate is. You can do this:
amixer -c <card#> contents.
In there somewhere you'll see something about "IEC958 External Rate",
and the next line will be the incoming sample rate (in samples/sec).
you'll want to make sure that the incoming sample rate and outgoing
sample rate are the same. So in my case for last night, I needed to do
the following with the 48k tape:
arecord -c hw:1,0 -r 48000 -f dat foo.wav
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:
Before I got to that solution, I found this nifty shell script in the
alsa archives that let's you specify optical/coax input. It
automagically figures out which hardware slot the PDAudio-CF occupies.
Here's a link the alsa archives message containing the script:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=7502478
That's it for today. I'm looking forward to recording my first live
convert this weekend using this device (backed up with DAT just in case...)!
Regards,
Daniel Zuckerman
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Nov 11 2004 - 16:08:48 EET