[philicorda[_9_]]

On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:43:33 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote:

philicorda writes:

First off, thanks for the detailed input.

[...]

To summarise: Avoid all the above. For general Linux audio it's easier
to right-click on the little speaker icon on the desktop and select a
sound card than to mess with ALSA.

What little speaker icon.... hehe. You must have something installed I
do not.

I'm running debian wheezy and kde and have kmix installed but when I
click it from the start menu, it just bounces a while then goes away...
I never see an interface

I'm running Ubuntu. They have put a huge amount of work into making
desktop Linux more user friendly. I used to enjoy doing it myself with
Linux, but I can't be bothered any more.

You can configure Debian wheezy the same way (Ubuntu is based on Debian
after all), but you will have to work it out yourself. Installing the
Phonon server would be a good place to start.


If you are doing music recording though, it is nice to be sure there is
no unnecessary latency, sample rate conversion or software mixing/gain
controls in the audio path. This is where Jack comes in.

I've seen mention of jack and did a little investigating... but its not
so easy seeing what should actually be installed, or if it would have
any bearing on sorting out the sound cards.

Jack is a sound server. It sits between audio programs and the ALSA
drivers.

What's nice about it is that means audio programs can talk to each other,
and the sound card. It only works with programs that support Jack, but
that is now the majority of audio programs worth using on Linux. It could
be seen as a combination of ASIO+Rewire on Windows or Mac.

To use it, install Jackd, and a Jack compatible program like Ardour.
Start jackd from the command line, or using QjackCtl, then start Ardour.

Ubuntu has these programs in the repository. They might be in Debian too.

Jack is really just for music. It solves a lot of problems on Linux when
recording audio, but makes some assumptions that make it less useful for
browsing YouTube etc at the same time.


I can make mplayer work with m-audio Fast Track but only by specifying
the device.

So, if I play something from web page, it does not work, seems it needs
to be set globally somehow.