High Geekery

[mdlbear]

This morning I finally got around to repackaging my mini-ITX board in a nice little case which I got at Fry's last week. It was the only small form-factor case they had, and I was hoping I could use the second 5.25" drive slot for one of my mobile drive trays to give it a removable hard drive. Fortunately I'd put the sound card in first -- the bottom drive slot conflicts with it. I settled for using the 120Gb drive.

I'd previously installed RedHat 9 on that drive, with an eye toward making it into a media server. So my next step was to head on over to Planet CCRMA for the latest in audio and video software (including ALSA, the new Advanced Linux Sound Architecture drivers that support my M-Audio Delta 66 sound card). It took about two hours to download and another hour to configure, at which point I could play through the sound card on the motherboard.

I'm always getting stuck at that point. ALSA is perfectly happy to let you configure two soundcards, but it took me quite a while to track down what passes for documentation for the process. It took me even longer to figure out that some apps just take a "card number" parameter, while others take a "driver name" of the form "hw:1" to designate the second card. At that point I discovered that my little 4-in, 4-out soundcard has no less than 12 assorted inputs. I still don't know which is which, because I haven't gotten it to record yet.

Routing between inputs, applications, and outputs in the ALSA world is done by means of the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK), which is basically a low-latency bit-pump. It's pretty hot stuff. Its documentation, on the other hand, ... Well, let's just say I thought software geeks had problems with documentation. It's nothing compared with the sound geeks who just want to get back to their music and never really figured out this "English" stuff anyway.

I was up until 2am waiting for chaoswolf to call from Pantheacon, with my head deep in the documentation. I'm getting close, though.

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[roaringmouse.livejournal.com]

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