Issue with Soft Vol. and Pandora

[Macross]

I will give your modded asound.conf a try on my test vortexbox. The format for the Paid pandora service is the same as the free, the only difference is there are no commercials or ads when you use the pandora web page player and no timeout.

[mwebster]

I will give your modded asound.conf a try on my test vortexbox. The format for the Paid pandora service is the same as the free, the only difference is there are no commercials or ads when you use the pandora web page player and no timeout.

The paid Pandora is advertised with higher quality audio. I assumed that meant a different bitrate that might possibly match up with the sound card (hw) and allow dmix to work without creating the dummy device. I had wanted to try it, but now I'm concerned I might screw something up and don't want to cover this ground again. Hope you have luck with your setup.

[Macross]

Your modded asound.conf file worked for me. The dmix sections that you added did the trick. All I had to do is match to my 5.1 analog audio output, so I removed the grey entry completely and changed the channels to 6 instead of 8. We are becoming masters of alsa.
Here is my modded asound.conf

#
# Place your global alsa-lib configuration here...
#


@hooks [
{
func load
files [
"/etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf"
]
errors false
}
]
#added
pcm.dummy {
type plug;
slave.pcm dmixer;
}
#end of added
pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1099
ipc_perm 0660
slave {
pcm "hw:0"
rate 44100
channels 6
periods 128
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
}
}
#added
ctl.dummy {
type dummy
}
#end of added


pcm.softvol {
type softvol

slave.pcm "green"
}

pcm.green {

type route
#slave.pcm dmixer
slave.pcm dummy
slave.channels 6
ttable.0.0 1
ttable.1.1 1
}

pcm.orange {
type route
#slave.pcm dmixer
slave.pcm dummy
slave.channels 6
ttable.0.4 1
ttable.1.5 1
}


pcm.black {
type route
#slave.pcm dmixer
slave.pcm dummy
slave.channels 6
ttable.0.2 1
ttable.1.3 1
}

[andrew]

Wow good work guys. I leaned all I know about ALSA (not that much) by hacking as well. How did you figure out this combination? Also did anybody ever try just replacing pcm "hw:0" with pcm "plughw:0" as I suggested? This may do the same thing with less code.

Also can somebody verify that the volume on each channel can be changed separately? I know in my initial testing some configurations resulted only a master volume. So If you changed the volume on one channel it would change on all the others as well.

[Macross]

It works on my box here at home with the LMS web interface. I tried to change the pcm "hw:0" to use plughw but it did not work. With the asound.conf file above, I was able to check the soft volume on on all of my analog interfaces that I split on my soundcard.

[mwebster]

Wow good work guys. I leaned all I know about ALSA (not that much) by hacking as well. How did you figure out this combination? Also did anybody ever try just replacing pcm "hw:0" with pcm "plughw:0" as I suggested? This may do the same thing with less code.

Also can somebody verify that the volume on each channel can be changed separately? I know in my initial testing some configurations resulted only a master volume. So If you changed the volume on one channel it would change on all the others as well.

I read that dmixer will not operate on hw:0, then found a post where someone had to find a workaround for using the alsa equalizer with dmixer and I stuck some things together and got lucky.

I tried replacing hw with plughw and it does not work.

I have been able to independently change the volume for my players. If I find anything that doesn't work properly, I'll update this post.

[mwebster]

I'm concerned that I might not be getting stereo with this setup. Anyone know of an easy way to check this?

Edit-
Nevermind. Think I'm good.