Alsa kernel modules and binaries for PCH.

[Goophy]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone have built those yet with all the dependencies?
Didn't find anything while searching, but I guess it won't hurt to ask.

Just wondering since it will take a decent amount of time to compile all the libs needed for mips.

Thanks in advance.

[Goophy]

I kind of did it myself, so if anyone need the mrua-driver and alsa-lib and utils binaries I could probably upload them somewhere.

[accident]

I forget who but someone has a csi install package for utilities on the pch.. you might want to pm him to add them in.

btw, does the sound work??? I know theres a few working on QT that could use this

[Goophy]

Sound via spdif and analog out worked.
It is a bit of a hassle to set up the configs right though, beeing able to run alsaconf would have helped a lot.

[dc11ab]

User vaidyasr maintains the utils packages for the 100 and 200-series respectively, to which this would be a great contribution!
https://code.google.com/p/a110utils/

[avanegmond]

(07-27-2010 09:20 PM)Goophy Wrote:  Sound via spdif and analog out worked.
It is a bit of a hassle to set up the configs right though, beeing able to run alsaconf would have helped a lot.

This is great!!

Now wait and see if somebody can compile the latest version of mpd in combination with these alsa drivers.

Than maybe we can still get a 24-bit enabled mpd on the Popcorn

-
aleg

[Goophy]

Just use a regular mpd build for mipsel32 and put something like this in the mpd-config:

audio_output {
type "alsa"
name "SPDIF"
device "hw:0,0"
}

Should work just fine. But 24bit would only be usable if you've got an external dac that supports 24bit over SPDIF or a USB DAC (but then you only need the snd_usb_audio module).

Here are the binaries:
http://mats.room101.no/mipsel-alsa.tar.bz2

Hosting provided by http://www.host1.no

[avanegmond]

(07-28-2010 08:50 AM)Goophy Wrote:  Just use a regular mpd build for mipsel32 and put something like this in the mpd-config:

audio_output {
type "alsa"
name "SPDIF"
device "hw:0,0"
}

Should work just fine. But 24bit would only be usable if you've got an external dac that supports 24bit over SPDIF or a USB DAC (but then you only need the snd_usb_audio module).

Here are the binaries:
http://mats.room101.no/mipsel-alsa.tar.bz2

Hosting provided by http://www.host1.no

I would like to try this.

I don't have a build of the latest mpd, but think one of the earlier mpd version should also be capable of handling 24-bit audio.
I would appreciate it if some one could make an NMT-build form the latest release of mpd.

My DAC is 192/24 capable (even more than that, but that not relevant except for USB).

Where would the alsa driver need to be copied to in the directory structure of the mpd?

Quote:bin
doc
etc
lib
playlists
plugins
var

Thanks for the help!!

-
aleg

[Goophy]

It's a kernel module, just load it and you'll get a card0 or something in /proc/asound.
Just run the snddevices script from the alsa-drivers package and you're good to go.

Only a matter of config after that.

If you're not comfortable with compiling stuff and "advanced" alsa-configuration I would advise you to just wait until someone makes a proper package. You will probably need a lot of extra utilities and drivers to get everything up and running.

[avanegmond]

Thanks for the reply Goophy

I'm afraid I belong to the latter category, so I have to wait for someone else to do the "hard" work.

-
aleg

[Goophy]

Turns out OSS was a lot easier, just load the kernel module and you're good to go pretty much.
Not the same possibilities as ALSA, but still works.

insmod soundcore.ko
insmod em8xxxoss.ko

They can be found here:
http://mats.room101.no/oss/

[avanegmond]

(07-28-2010 06:16 PM)Goophy Wrote:  Turns out OSS was a lot easier, just load the kernel module and you're good to go pretty much.
Not the same possibilities as ALSA, but still works.

insmod soundcore.ko
insmod em8xxxoss.ko

They can be found here:
http://mats.room101.no/oss/

I don't need a lot of possibilities, I want as little as possible actually. I just want a bit-perfect output on the SPDIF of the input audio files.

So if I understand correctly, I would need to ftp those two .ko files to some directory on the Popcorn A-100 and then run the above commands on each of the files.

Modify the mpd.config into something like this (mpd supports OSS):

Quote:audio_output {
type "ao"
name "SPDIF"
driver "oss"
}

And then it should run over the OSS drivers with 24-bit audio?!

If it doesn't work, what command would I use to remove those two kernel modules?

The OSS is it based on OSS4 or OSS3?
(I read that mpd doesn't fully support OSS4 yet, but should work for most ordinary things)

Is the OSS-driver bit perfect as far as you know, i.e. if no volume control and no mixer is active, all bits that go in come out exactly the same at the SPDIF-port?

A lot of questions I know, but this is what I'm looking for.

I won't be able to try it all tonight, but might find some space to do it tomorrow.

-
aleg

[Goophy]

Looks like the guy at Sigma only bothered to write in 8 and 16-bit support.
It's trivial to add more though, only basic C. Possible to copy a lot of it.

The OSS-version is only for the userspace tools, this is just a driver written for those tools.

I guess it would be bit perfect if you can avoid jitter though.

[avanegmond]

(07-28-2010 09:05 PM)Goophy Wrote:  Looks like the guy at Sigma only bothered to write in 8 and 16-bit support.
It's trivial to add more though, only basic C. Possible to copy a lot of it.

The OSS-version is only for the userspace tools, this is just a driver written for those tools.

I guess it would be bit perfect if you can avoid jitter though.

If you mean AlanH who developed the mpd-plugin (and ShadowCode who I thought was going to take over), they stopped developing the 24-bit version of the mpd-plugin for some untold reason.

If your ALSA and OSS drivers still depend on this plugin, then it is not what I was hoping for.
I had hoped to be able to by-pass the mpd-plugin just because they didn't develop it any further into a 24-bit capable version.

For me this means that I will stop using the Popcorn for audio playback as soon as I have found another device that will do 24-bit audio and has a proper user-interface like the mPod for mpd.

Thanks for the info and trouble.

[Goophy]

(07-29-2010 05:56 AM)avanegmond Wrote:  If you mean AlanH who developed the mpd-plugin (and ShadowCode who I thought was going to take over), they stopped developing the 24-bit version of the mpd-plugin for some untold reason.

No, I mean the guy at Sigma that wrote the proprietary ALSA and OSS-drivers for em8xxx.
This has nothing to do with any plugins or modifications to mpd and does not depend on it.

It's just to get an ordinary PCM device instead of ioctls for everything.