Audio, the SheevaPlug and the Linux distros

[bedek]

Any tutorials on this?

I'm getting complete garble/distortion with my "3D Sound" USB audio adapter. It works on my Synology NAS...

Hi,

I've found this article:
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/playing-audio-on-the-nslu2

I was testing my card with mpg321 and aplay - author of that link reports that these players do not works properly - what players did you used to test your card ?

Yes I know that he is using nslu2 but maybe there might be common problem with lack of FPU ?

Regards.

[bedek]

Any tutorials on this?

I'm getting complete garble/distortion with my "3D Sound" USB audio adapter. It works on my Synology NAS...

Hi,

And one more comment found on:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/SlugAsAudioPlayer

"...
I (karibou-hunter) found, and tried, successfull this one : http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5831 (this site is amazing

I (epninety) found that not all the USB sound dongles are equal. Mine looks like those described (translucent case, "3D-sound"), but only has one LED (some have two), and doesn't use the CM10x chip. It works straight out of the box, and plays my 320kbit MP3s with no glitches or gaps. Trouble is, the distortion is terrible! Even a simple sine wave has lots of distortion - (2nd harmonic of 10kHz tone only -20dB at full output, lots of other 'sprogs' visible too). Maybe I got a bad one? Chip bears the numbers "1621 C1-M6C P4A53-010C", not sure of the manufacturer.
..."

Looks like some devices which event look this same are different and will not work correctly ?!

[bedek]

Just an update, looks like card works fine with madplay (cpu load about 15 - 20%) and mplayer (cpu load about 30%) but with aplay the sound is very distort.

And one more thing with mplayer, initially it show error, but wait a second and it will play fine:

AO: [pulse] Init failed: Connection refused
Failed to initialize audio driver 'pulse'
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Video: no video
Starting playback...

[Brandt]

Any tutorials on this?

I'm getting complete garble/distortion with my "3D Sound" USB audio adapter. It works on my Synology NAS...

Hi,

I've exactly this same problem - did you solved it ?

Regards.

I thought I had solved it by creating an .asoundrc file in the roots home directory and increasing the buffer size, but then I heard distortion again last time i tested it. :-/

[birdman]

Just an update, looks like card works fine with madplay (cpu load about 15 - 20%) and mplayer (cpu load about 30%) but with aplay the sound is very distort.

Similar behaviour noted in this thread.

[bedek]

Just an update, looks like card works fine with madplay (cpu load about 15 - 20%) and mplayer (cpu load about 30%) but with aplay the sound is very distort.

Similar behaviour noted in this thread.

As I understand the issue is related with the fact that cheap USB cards works in 48 kHz  frequency, so player needs to resample data before sending them to audio card - but this process needs a lot of cpu power. Looks like some player have more efficient implementation of resamplers and they can play mp3 smoothly.

For example here is post which allowed me to use my cheap USB card with mpd (Music Player Daemon):

For anyone experiencing problems with mpd and $1 48khz usb cards: mpd has to resample the usually 44.1khz music to 48khz. This can be very cpu-intensive depending on the chosen sampler.

Code:

mpd.conf
audio_output_format             "48000:16:2"
samplerate_converter            "ZOH Interpolator"

The zoh resampler is reasonable fast on the dockstar, the default will result in very slow playback and 100% cpu load.

Original post is here:
http://plugapps.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=206&start=10#p2049

[Brandt]

I'm not going to be playing mp3's. I'm only using it for text to speech output on my home automation server. Flite and/or Festival...

Also, this USB sound adapter worked perfectly on my previous and current NAS running linux:

previous NAS:

# CPU: 266MHz, 32bit@133, with floating point
# Memory: 64MB

current NAS:

# CPU Frequency: 1.2GHz
# Memory: 256MB

Sheevaplug has 1.2GHz w/ 512MB so I dunno what the problem is...

[bedek]

I'm not going to be playing mp3's. I'm only using it for text to speech output on my home automation server. Flite and/or Festival...

Also, this USB sound adapter worked perfectly on my previous and current NAS running linux:

previous NAS:

# CPU: 266MHz, 32bit@133, with floating point
# Memory: 64MB

current NAS:

# CPU Frequency: 1.2GHz
# Memory: 256MB

Sheevaplug has 1.2GHz w/ 512MB so I dunno what the problem is...

Could you try to use madplay just to see if your card is able to work smoothly ?
What is the command to use flite/festival to output text file as sound to usb card ?

[Mh-Sheeva]

Hello,   
Sheevaplug
Debian Squeeze

My USB hub :
Here

My audio card :
USB 3D SOUND
Model HY554
JMTek, LLC. audio controller

Install package (optional) : alsa-utils

To play mp3 file ...
Install package : madplay
$> madplay file.mp3

OR

Install package : mplayer (much better)
$> mplayer -ao alsa -msgcolor -cache 64 http://www.tv-radio.com/station/fip_mp3/fip_mp3-128k.m3u
(To decrease or increase volume "/" and "*", quit "q", for more information : "man mplayer")

For Alsa :
Create the following file : ~/.asoundrc
and copy :
################################

defaults.ctl.card X
defaults.pcm.card X

###############################
Replace X with the card number, to know :
$> cat /proc/asound/cards

Sound diagnose...
List the modules related to sound
$> lsmod | grep snd

List sound cards managed by the system
$> cat /proc/asound/cards
$> cat /proc/asound/oss/sndstat

List chipset(s)
$> aplay -l

For Midi
$> aplaymidi -l

Bye 
[Sorry for my English]

[Brandt]

Could you try to use madplay just to see if your card is able to work smoothly ?
What is the command to use flite/festival to output text file as sound to usb card ?

I've tried madplay...no good...

try apt-get install flite
and then do
flite -t "hello world"

you should hear something....

now when I make it longer:

flite -t "hello world I am a sheevaplug computer and I can't do audio very well, or maybe my owner does not know what he's doing"

then it will start to crackle and get fuzzy and unrecognizable toward the middle.