Alsa playback rate issue

Question

Well, after a few stints with Gentoo (too much compiling for THIS machine, great distro overall though) and Debian (not a fan...), I'm back to Arch, which I've used since '08. Easily a tie with Gentoo for my favorite distro, and it flies on this machine. However, I have the first issue I simply have NOT been able to resolve, and it's with sound. Very strange issue, too.
After I got the OS installed and a user created, one of the first things I installed was, of course, alsa-utils. I ran alsaconf, it (as always) found my onboard sound, no problem. (FWIW, it's using snd-intel8x0, according to modprobe.d/sound.conf) However, I ran into the first issue I have ever had with this, regardless of distro. When I try to play _anything_ through the console, be it pianobar for Pandora, or ogg123 for my music, I get this error:
ao_alsa WARNING: sample rate 44100 not supported by the hardware, using 48000
Mind you, Daft Punk sounds kinda neat like that, it's obviously not what I'm going for. The strangest part of it all, is that Gstreamer plays everything just fine. Rhythmbox / Pithos (buggy, but working) play the songs right. Whether it's properly re-rating it, or it has a way to bypass the "hardware" issue that I've never had before, I'll never know. All I know is, I can't use my beloved terminal if I want to, and to me that's a bit of a disappointment,
I've Googled this, and pretty much turned up nothing, so I'm now turing to our great community to tell me whether I've overlooked something, or if I should go bug report. Only thing I ask here is that if you respond with "RTFM", at least tell me WHICH manual, because all of 'em I've read tell me nothing useful. Thanks guys!

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is more of a "me too" than anything constructive. I recently set up a plug device (pogoplug) connected to an external USB sound card, and am having a similar issue (specifically with pianobar). I tried switching to pulse audio as my backend with:
[nogoma@freya ~]$ cat /etc/libao.conf
default_driver=pulse
This works (uses pulse), but pulseaudio runs like a dog on this machine (audio is extremely choppy). I think it's doing a better job of resampling, but the audio is actually too choppy for me to tell. It may simply be the answer that the hardware in this machine is insufficient to handle the resampling, but the reason I tried pulseaudio to begin with is that I can't seem to configure alsa to resample the audio to 48000. That is, the USB soundcard only supports this rate, but I'm sort of expecting that libao provide alsa w/ the 44100 rate, and alsa should handle the resample to 48000. I guess it's unclear to me where the resampling should occur; in libao? In alsa?
My current asound.rc is:
[nogoma@freya ~]$ cat /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave {
pcm "hw:Pro"
channels 2
rate 48000
pcm.dmixer6 {
type dmix
ipc_key 2342
slave {
pcm "hw:Pro"
channels 6
period_time 0
period_size 4096
buffer_size 262144
rate 48000
(This is admittedly hacked up from various sources). Should the default device be advertising a rate of 44100, and the dmix device 48000, and alsa should resample then? Basically, it seems like libao is trying to produce a 48000 rate that ALSA is expecting, but doing it poorly (audio definitely has a "too fast", chipmunk, effect to it), but not really sure where I should be poking to fix... Maybe the answer is finding a different sound device that supports 44100 natively (but, I'd presumably have the same issue if I had an audio source that was a different rate again!). That, or put some beefier hardware in there and use pulseaudio...
Last edited by nogoma (2011-05-11 21:26:02)