Alsa: reroute sound output to line in?

Hello,
i've been on this for a week now, not getting anywhere.
but now i'm determined to crack the nut that is alsa.
a familiar problem: i want to use alsa's sound output - pcm or master - internally.
i have set up a loopback device now; it works with e.g. recordmydesktop, but the application i'm interested in seems to only chose the first capture channel of the default soundcard :-(
(it's sndpeek).
so, is it possible to duplicate & reroute the default card's pcm or master channel back into the default card's Line channel (Line in)?
of course i'm open to other suggestions.
thanks.
current .asoundrc (creates a 2nd sound card that i cannot access with sndpeek, but works otherwise)
pcm.!default { type asym
playback.pcm "LoopAndReal"
#capture.pcm "looprec"
capture.pcm "hw:0,0"
pcm.looprec { type hw
card "Loopback"
device 1
subdevice 0
pcm.LoopAndReal { type plug
slave.pcm mdev
route_policy "duplicate"
pcm.mdev { type multi
slaves.a.pcm pcm.MixReale
slaves.a.channels 2
slaves.b.pcm pcm.MixLoopback
slaves.b.channels 2
bindings.0.slave a
bindings.0.channel 0
bindings.1.slave a
bindings.1.channel 1
bindings.2.slave b
bindings.2.channel 0
bindings.3.slave b
bindings.3.channel 1
pcm.MixReale { type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave { pcm "hw:0,0"
rate 48000
#rate 44100
periods 128
period_time 0
period_size 1024 # must be power of 2
buffer_size 8192
pcm.MixLoopback { type dmix
ipc_key 1025
slave { pcm "hw:Loopback,0,0"
rate 48000
#rate 44100
periods 128
period_time 0
period_size 1024 # must be power of 2
buffer_size 8192
- copied over from here.
the soundcard is a basic laptop intel chip.
$ dmesg|grep -i intel
[ 1.037761] i915 0000:00:02.0: fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
[ 19.315080] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: irq 44 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 20.408741] input: HDA Intel Headphone as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input10
[ 20.408940] input: HDA Intel Line as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input11
[ 20.409100] input: HDA Intel Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input12
thanks for any advice!
Last edited by ondoho (2013-11-07 19:37:46)

so, is it possible to duplicate & reroute the default card's pcm or master channel back into the default card's Line channel (Line in)?
If you're talking about the analog audio path the answer is maybe. But fair warning, you'll be spending many more hours (maybe) getting it to work while wallowing real deep in today's integrated audio hardware and ALSA if you want to use this method.
the soundcard is a basic laptop intel chip.
This is the first thing you need to learn. That chip is generic and found on almost all modern x86 motherboards. Where the audio magic actually happens is the "codec" chip and the vendor/model varies. The HDA Intel chip merely "talks" to the codec chip which sits "behind" the HDA Intel chip on the bus.
So the first step is to figure out which codec chip is installed and then determine if you can "manually" connect the "virtual wires" inside the codec to make a connection from the output (play) to the input (capture).
One way that you might find which codec you have is to enter:
less /proc/asound/cardX/codec#Y
where "X" is your card number and "Y" is the codec number
Just look for "Codec:" near the top. Also, there's gobs of other good info in that file that will be used in a moment.
The codec chip contains what I call "virtual wires" that connect it's internal components (amplifiers, mixers, ADCs, DACs, etc). ALSA gathers info from BIOS and determines which connections to enable, but I've found that most codec chips have many connections that are not enabled. More importantly in this case, I've also found that many chips have a connection from the output (play) to the input (capture), it's just not enabled... and that may (or may not) also be the case for your chip. I've been able to enable the internal connections in my chips to create a hardware loopback so that Line Out is connected to Line In... so what you hear in the speakers is also sent to ALSA's capture interface... and the capture level is independently adjustable.
So how would you inspect and change these "virtual wires"? With a program called hda-analyzer. It will use the data in the /proc/asound directory (and more) to show you how your codec is wired in both text and graphics form, along with allowing you to change it. One way to get it is by running this command:
wget -O run.py http://www.alsa-project.org/hda-analyzer.py
I'll leave it to you to figure out which dependency packages need to be installed, but once you install them, run:
python2 run.py
where it will download yet more code (possibly in the /dev/shm directory) and will barf because you either need to install yet more dependency packages to run hda_analyzer.py, or simply because it tried to automatically run it using python3 (because it's also a python2 program, so run it manually like: "python2 hda_analyzer.py").
Once you get it running, the confusion factor will probably kick into high gear. Take your time and poke around. Get your bearings somewhat by clicking on "Graph" to display the wiring layout and hover your mouse over the square blocks and the wires. As I said in a previous post, if you can download the datasheet for your codec chip, it may help if it includes an internal diagram:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147208
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 3#p1089243
Any changes you make to the "wiring" are instantaneous (so you can try it while making changes) and will go away on a reboot. Clicking "Exp" will create a python script of your changes that you can run later to make those connections again from the command line.
Good luck, and I'll check back to help if I can find the time... that is if you're up for such a major challenge.
Last edited by pigiron (2013-11-10 04:31:25)

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type route
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pcm.dmixed {
type asym
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type dmix
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ipc_perm 0660
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type hw
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Hi
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Message was edited by: Yiannis

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http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/3544/picture1xnn.png
Message was edited by: Yiannis

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My three year old Airport Express with Airtunes is broke. It' smells burned when I smell by the ethernet port. So, no more iTunes output to my HiFi system with the Airport Express
Now my HiFi system is connected via the Line-out sound output. The system sounds and for example Youtube movies now also playing into HiFi.
I want to know if there is an plugin for iTunes to redirect sound to an different sound port on my Mac Pro. System sounds to headphones or internal speakers and iTunes to Line-out (HiFi). Is this possible? With system prefs (10.5.1) you only can choose one output for all sound.
Is there an plugin for iTunes to redirect sound output?

I have tried Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil but this program is meant to redirect all kind off sounds to one or more AirPort Express.
I don't have an AirPort Express anymore so I want to redirect sounds from iTunes to line-out and I want system sounds to internal speakers or headphones.

Alsa: reroute sound output to line in?

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