Colin.Guthr.ie Illegitimi non carborundum

2Aug/095

Sound on Linux is Confusing: Defuzzing Part 1: ALSA

So I often hear the phrase: "Sound on Linux is Confusing". While I don't totally disagree with this statement, as with everything on Linux the sound system is pretty logical and if you follow through the steps you can demystify things pretty quickly. So this article will explain how things work on Mandriva and should ensure users are more comfortable with "how things work".

27Jul/091

Integrating Login and Home Directory on OS X Leopard Clients

I've recently been dabbling in OS X related stuff. One of the things that is important to me is ensuring that my login details and users can use the OS X machine just the same as any other. Not that I really have any need for this, seeing as I'm pretty much the only user, but I like to learn these things :)

29Jun/091

What’s cooking in the Pulse Pot

While I've done a bit of pavucontrol hacking, the most interesting stuff is happening in pulse itself, specifically in relation to better KDE support...

29Jun/092

Configuring audio ports in PulseAudio

As I added support for changing card profiles in PulseAudio, now that pulse supports "ports" it's time for me to get my developer hat on again!

28Feb/091

Configuring card profiles in PulseAudio

The upcoming 0.9.15 release of PulseAudio will support "card profiles". What in the name of Almighty Bob (where Bob is a deity of questionable existence) is a card profile I hear you all cry. Well in our world of cost savings the majority of sound cards can operating in different but mutually exclusive configurations. For example some devices are capable of outputting 5.1 surround sound, but to do this they use the same jacks as are normally used for sound input, so you cannot record sound from the device when it is playing 5.1 sound.

As expected, information concerning what these capabilities are and under what situation they can be used simultaneously is not supplied to us by the ALSA layer. So to get around this problem,PulseAudio will probe for various configurations for you and provide a handy list which will allow for easy configuration. Sadly there is no GUI to control this. Or rather there was no GUI....