[LAU] Sound Editors, Alsa, and alsa.conf troubles

I have a soundblaster as card0 and a Delta44 as card1.
I want to keep it this way so that most trivial sounds
come through the soundblaster, and leave the Delta44 open
for use as a serious soundcard.

Lately, I've been having trouble getting any decent
sound editor to use the second card. Audacity should
do it, but on my Kubuntu system, it crashes when opening
or playing a file. I find this in my log:

alsactl: resmgr: communication failure: Connection refused

or

audacity: resmgr: communication failure: No such file or directory

So, unless I can get it to work, I'm stuck with other editors.
It's amazing, but many of the decent looking editors will not
allow any configuration of device, and always use /dev/dsp0.
That sucks. Now, when they do allow me to select the second
card as /dev/dsp1, I get errors about the format not being
supported. This is because the Delta is really a 12 channel
card without hardware for the extra channels. In properly
written alsa programs, I can use hw:plughw1,0. But I haven't
found any decent editor that will let me specify something
like this.

Now I'm wondering whether I can do something tricky in
my /etc/asound.conf that would let the unaware programs
use my Delta44. I look at the docs (such as they are)
once in a while, but I never come up with anything valuable.
Just today, I started by making a simple slave:

pcm.delta {
        type hw
        card 1
        device 0
}

pcm_slave.sltest {
    pcm delta
}

pcm.live {
        type hw
        card 0
        device 0
}

But aplay will not use -D sltest:

ALSA lib pcm.c:2090:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM sltest
aplay: main:547: audio open error: No such file or directory

I don't know how to go about getting a better understanding of
this most arcane config file.

Thanks,

Tobiah

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Received on Tue Oct 16 00:15:02 2007