2015 — 8 December: Tuesday
A second night of unusually-extended unconsciousness has just ended. I can see some uninvitingly-dark grey clouds up there in the Big Outdoors.1 They will get their target practice today as I have to venture out (for the first time in over 72 hours) to make a fresh supplies run at some point.
And after Friday's "alarums" from one of the many machines that go "beep" in the Mazda (during my excursion to the "Castle of Comfort") I shall also swing by Halfords to inspect their range of portable tyre pumper-uppers. Chaps need to treat their cars (as well as their computers) on occasion.
Was it really...
... nine years ago today?! I fear so, yes:
Since I currently use a non-HDCP plasma screen ... feed all my video signals to it via a decent quality scaler ... paid a not-so-small fortune for it less than four years ago, I am in no hurry to replace [it]. I have not yet finished burning nasty on-screen logos onto it. So my decision is, of course, at what point do I buy a top-of-the-range DVD player prior to the onslaught from either or both Blu-Ray and HD DVD?
Who remembers HD DVD? [Pause] Eddie Izzard has just chosen some of the music (the "Grand Chorale"?, by Georges Delerue) from that lovely 1973 Truffaut film "La Nuit Américaine". I picked up my DVD of it a mere four years ago. Doesn't time fly?! [Pause] And I've just been offered a surplus-to-requirements pumper-upper. Excellent!
Blimey! My breakfast will have metamorphosed into lunch if I don't get some soon. This won't do at all.
Isn't it nice...
... when you first learn about something being a potential audio problem at the same time as you learn that it only seems to affect Windows systems? This afternoon's example: high DPC latency. DPC being a Windows Deferred Procedure Call. All Procedure Calls are no doubt equal but (it would seem) some are more equal than others :-)
Yesterday I proved...
... my new Xonar U7 external soundcard was able to output digital audio from a simple .wav file piped directly to it with a terminal command. Today I am revelling in glorious digital audio from (another) "Late Junction" .m4a file that is even as I type being sent in bitstream format to the Audiolab, from the Xonar, following a single line kludge that does manually what the pulseaudio system seems (for whatever reason) to be unable to do correctly at start-up. Having first typed:
aplay -l
to list my audio devices and confirm the device number (still 2, as it happens) of the Xonar soundcard all I had to do was manually "make known" the device to the Linux audio system as a legitimate sink for audio to gurgle down (as it were):
pactl load-module module-alsa-sink device=plughw:2,1
And then pavucontrol finally admits there's a new "Xonar U7" device (in addition to the "Xonar U7 Analog Stereo" one it already knew about) and lets me select it. Yes, it's a kludge, and no, it won't survive a reboot, but it will do the trick for now. Thanks, Brian!
Wait!
It can be "permanentised" (to coin a deliciously ugly word) as follows. Go to your local pulse config folder:
cd ~/.config/pulse
and copy the system default pulse audio file here (note the final '.')
cp /etc/pulse/default.pa .
Edit this now-local default.pa to add the following line to the end (you are card 2 for the Xonar):
load-module module-alsa-sink device=plughw:2,1
Digital audio should now survive reboot. If anything goes awry at anytime — like the machine ever crashes or audio stops — just delete ~/.config/pulse/default.pa
Simples!
Verdict?
No complaints from me. I shall next remove the X-Fi PCI card for it to be probed more effectively elsewhere to see if its propensity to get thrown somewhere beyond BlackBeast's ken can be diagnosed and fixed. I expect that will change the Xonar's card (device) number, so I shall have to edit the 'default.pa' config file accordingly. There may yet turn out to be a way to pin it down as the default sound card. I'm too busy listening to the nice music (and digesting my venison soup) to investigate right now. It can be discussed on tomorrow's walk assuming the weather permits.
[Pause]
Correct. With the X-Fi removed, the Xonar is now seen as device #1. Until I zapped and replaced that 'default.pa' config file the entire audio system went away. The Xonar also now reports itself capable of digital stereo (IEC 958) though this is a big, fat, fib. The trick to successfully getting digital output from it remains to select the "Xonar U7" that makes no such claims. Nor does the card remain "selected" across a reboot, though it is trivially easy to re-select it.