Re: [Denemo-devel] Newbie getting MIDI K/B to work with ALSA and qjackctl - update - some progress

[Edgar Aichinger]

Hello,

Am Mittwoch, 22. Januar 2014, 10:58:36 schrieb Philip Rhoades:
> Edgar,
> 
> OK, I have made some progress but a thorough analysis would require lots 
> of reboots of my server and I don't have time to do that at the moment - 
> sticking to ALSA for the time being:
> 
> - if I boot with the MIDI K/B plugged in - user "phil" can't get 
> ANYTHING going at all - no normal sound with mplayer, no MIDI 
> connections; root can get sound reliably and MIDI connections about half 
> the time; I think the order of the sound cards is being changed and also 
> there is a permission problem somewhere - I tried chmodding everything 
> in /dev/snd to 666 but it didn't help
> 
> - if I boot WITHOUT the MIDI K/B plugged in and plug it in after booting 
> - user phil and root can actually have normal sound plus MIDI connection 
> maybe about half of the time? - sometimes the existing Preferences setup 
> "just works" - like you said, but sometimes I have to reselect an item 
> and save it or select something else, save it and then change back to 
> what is listed above - sometimes I can't get it to work until another 
> reboot
> 
> - with limited testing, a cold boot seems to give better results than a 
> warm boot?
> 
> - sometimes, making some change or other will cause the loss of sound 
> and I will have to reboot just to get a working machine
> 
> At least now I know it can be made to work eventually, even if the 
> situation seems to be a bit hit and miss . .

I'm sorry, You described this in a previous mail already and I forgot to 
answer...

I see similar behaviour with my USB devices, so I have a few links for you to 
read up on ALSA device ordering during boot:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/MultipleCards

http://info.vortexbox.org/tiki-index.php?page=Lock+audio+device+order+at+boot

(For me the index= module parameter trick didn't work the last time i tried, 
and the boot order still was random, so currently i just take care to have all 
the USB gear unplugged while booting)

I don't really know about your other problems, these would need a more detailed 
investigation to be solved i think, as there are so many variables involved: 
which soundcards are available, which desktop audio subsystem (plain ALSA or 
PulseAudio)

It's a pity that systemd behaves so differently for the alsasound runlevel 
service. With sysvinit you could just "/etc/init.d/alsasound restart" as root, 
to reset all your devices and order of soundcards, with systemd service restart 
it just saves and restores state, as far as i've understood.

And finally, did you try to install my latest denemo build, does portmidi work 
now?

Edgar

> 
> Thanks to all!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Phil.
>