[Sussex] USB Speakers

[Steve Dobson]

Hi Jan

On 21/07/11 13:46, Jan Henkins wrote:
> Hello Steve,
> 
> On Thu, July 21, 2011 12:41, Steve Dobson wrote:
> 
>> Many thanks for your suggestion.  I didn't know of PulseAudio and I will
>> have to check it out.  As I use Debian it's only a quick "apt-get install"
>> away.
> 
> Hmm, doesn't Debian also use PulseAudio by default these days? I know that
> Fedora and Ubuntu does. Anyway, do the following to see what you have
> available to install:
> 
> $ apt-cache search pulseaudio

Already done search thanks.

To be absolutely pedantically Debian installs very, very little by
default.  less(1) for example isn't installed.  A base system is very
limited.  Little more than some basic editors, a shell or two an an
e-mail system.  Which is exactly what you want if you're installing a
single (or limited) task server.

During the installation process TaskSel is run which has a list of
configuration groupings: Workstation, Laptop, Database server.   It does
select some for you but gives you the option of removing some or all of
it's suggestions.  I like that approach, it allows one to build exactly
the system you want/need.

As I knew the was space was going to be limited on my netbook from the
getgo I would have removed all apart from "Desktop" and "Laptop".

Having read the recommendations from apt I ended up doing:

# apt-get install pulseaudio paman paprefs pavumeter pavucontrol

Which I think got me what you were expected.  Anyhow I am now very
pleased with the result.

>> Out of interest, what happen if you try playing sound (music or video)
>> when you don't have your Lindy USB sound device plugged in?  I haven't
>> tried that out yet on this this netbook.
> 
> On my Lenovo it works through the built-in speakers. In this case it's not
> all that bad, the IdeaPad Z300 series have relatively good audio from a
> playback perspective. Unfortunately ALSA, and therefore PulseAudio, does
> not see the built-in microphone on this particular motherboard, so I only
> use the Lindy when I need to do VoIP. The default Ubuntu Natty behaviour
> is to leave the current default audio devices as-is, so the only way for
> me to change things would be to adjust the audio device "order of
> preference". KDE has a Multimedia applet that controls Gstreamer, which in
> turn affects the way the PulseAudio daemon uses your audio devices. I seem
> to remember that it was actually a lot easier to do the same under Gnome2,
> so you should be OK.

Things didn't work from the get-go for me.  The sound would just stop if
I pressed any of the on speaker button.  It turned out (after a bit more
digging) that there is an issue with PulseAudio with regards to logging
information to syslogd.  It can swamp it!  So it often just reports the
number of events it has suppressed - this making debug very difficult.

Any how I did find a suggestion that you needed to log out and log back
in again with Gnome (maybe KDE too).  I am not someone that logs out
often, I can be logged on for weeks at an end.  And after that (not a
reboot) the speaks work fine with the desktop controls.  No lockup or
lost of sound at all.

But the on-speaker buttons still don't control the write device.  I
really do thing that that's a bug.  So, thanks for the PulseAudio
suggestion. It was the solution I was looking for.

Steve

-- 
Steve Dobson