Re: [LAU] Linux Audio Diagnostics Tool

Excerpts from allcoms's message of 2011-06-07 13:13:12 +0200:
> Hi Linux Audio Land!
>
> I've been thinking recently just how useful it would be- certainly to
> Linux audio distros and (Linux (audio)) newbs, if we had an app that
> could tell you what sound systems are currently active and let you
> test them- both audio in and output for ALSA, JACK and Pulse at the
> very least but FFADO, esound, phonon and whatever else would be great
> to see included too. Even for a Linux old-timer like me its tough
> remembering all the different mixers, daemons and diagnostic utils and
> commands to work out where you are when you have sound trouble. If it
> can't fix your problems automagically then it would be good if it
> could advise the user on how to get their desired sound system
> functional, if not optimised as in the case of JACK as I think that
> could end up being its own app or should be integrated into qjackctl.
> JACK gives more useful error messages now which should help in putting
> something like this together but AFAIK there's nothing out there like
> this atm.
>
> Anyone know of an existing app like this or if work has already begun
> on such a tool?

I only know of a script that checks the environment and tries to figure
out whether system settings are sane for pro audio, but I know of no
program to test all possible audio systems.

The idea is good, but I see some potential problems:
- dependencies: would one need to install every sound system to run the
  program? I think it would be necessary to discover sound systems at
  runtime, which, I guess, is hard, because so few programs do it.

- distribution dependent stuff: I think about paths and stuff. It could
  be hard to give sane advise if configuration is different between
  distributions.

- relevant non-audio stuff: Non-audio stuff also needs to be taken into
  account, for example: recently I talked to someone on IRC who had
  trouble with getting jack to run. I talked him through all the typical
  things and it still didn't work. It turned out that policykit was at
  fault.

It's a good idea but I doubt it's easy to do. Are you a programmer and
have experience with the necessary stuff? To me it looks like a
worthwhile thing and something I'd like to work on during the summer,
but I doubt I could do it alone. This is definitely a team job,
especially because it needs to be tested on various setups.

Regards,
Philipp

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Received on Fri Jun 10 16:15:04 2011