[PD] RME, alsa 0.9beta6, pd-0.34test5: sharing info

[Nick Fells]

Hi,

Sorry for doubles, but I'm sending this to the alsa-users list and the
Pd list.

Thought I'd share this with the lists in case it's useful for anyone.

My setup is as follows:

Debian Sid GNU/Linux, with RME Hammerfall Light for multichannel audio
and SB16 for MIDI.

Using Alsa 0.9beta6, and pd-0.34test5:

1. Compiled alsa from sources, had problems with alsamixer not finding
ncurses so bypassed that and made other utils manually. Edited
/etc/modutils/aliases to put in info for alsa as follows:

# ALSA aliases
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-rme9652
alias snd-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

alias snd-card-1 snd-card-sb16
options snd-card-sb16 snd_index=1 snd_port=0x220 snd_irq=7 snd_dma8=1
snd_dma16=5
alias snd-slot-1 snd-card-1

No doubt some of this is unnecessary (and irqs etc might be different),
but this was done trial and error from the alsa documentation. In
particular, the RME card seemed to default to irq5, without me
specifying any options in the aliases file; the SB I set to irq7 because
it appeared to be free when I did 'cat /proc/interrupts'.
Ran update-modules to make a new /etc/modules.conf file.
Made alsa devices using 'snddevices' in the alsa-drivers package.

2. On booting, some kind of alsa driver modules are loaded, but not the
right ones, so I do '/etc/init.d/alsasound stop' to kill it then
'/etc/init.d/alsasound start' to start it up again. This loads the RME
and SB modules ok. Don't know why this is yet.

3. Downloaded, compiled and installed Guenter's rme96xx driver. In order
to load it, the alsa RME driver needs unloading using 'rmmod
snd-card-rme9652'. 'insmod rme96xx' loads the new one.

4. Downloaded and compiled Pd (with alsa support enabled), but needed to
make links from the headers in /usr/include/tcl8.3 into the pd/src
directory in order for it to compile.

5. Am running Pd with './pd -frags 1 -blocksize 1 -inchannels 8
-outchannels 8 -midiindev 2 -midioutdev 2'. This talks to /dev/midi1 or
/dev/midi01 which is what the SB midi device seems to be.

et voila, multichannel i/o from an ADAT with midi control from a Peavey
PC1600.

Hope that is of some use to someone. If anyone can suggest improvements
please do!

Nick :)

-- 
Dr Nick Fells,	
Music Department,
University of Glasgow,		Tel: +44 (0) 141-330 4096
Glasgow G12 8QQ			Fax: +44 (0) 141-330 3518
UK.				http://www.music.gla.ac.uk/~nick