Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

Hi, great to hear your DAC works with mplayer, and thanks a lot for your feedback! Pacmd is in the package pulseaudio-utils, however it gives an error message when run from the shell ("No PulseAudio demon running, or not running as session daemon").

I've found a way to circumvent this somewhere on the net:
(needs gainroot package or however it's called)
However there may be no sink for your card. You could try to edit /etc/pulse/default.pa. There's a line starting with "load-module module-alsa-sink-old sink-name=sink.hw0 device=hw:0 ...". Try to copy that and change the sink-name to something else (sink.hw1 already exists, but I guess it's something different) and change the "device=hw:0" to "device=hw:1,0" (or maybe only "device=hw:1"?). I have no real clue how this all works in there.

Then look if on restarting pulseaudio/reboot a new sink appears...

I have not tried this myself yet, but would be very interested in your findings...

A second, a bit more brutal alternative could be just changing the device number in default.pa, and reboot. But you should take the possibility into account that you have to reflash - I cannot afford to try atm :)

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

Well, least I could do, right ? :-)

Thanks for the tips on pacmd. Of course I'm going to investigate pulseaudio (although you claim to know nothing about it, I know even less :-) and report back on how it goes...

BTW, do you know what the last (percent) value on the mplayer console status line means ?
From the docs it could be the audio CPU usage, but I'm not sure.
On my N900 it shows about 20% while playing an MP3 file, and much lower for FLAC (around 3%, never reaching 5). Also, the CPU meter bar (in the Hildon status bar) never moves while decoding Flac, while it sometimes jumps up & down with mp3.

EDIT - PS: that workaround for pacmd is not working as-is... I get : "Daemon not responding"...

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

Hmm, never paid attention to it. But I guess if it's in the docs it should be right :) But keep in mind that it's probably only the cpu usage from mplayer itself, not from mplayer + host mode driver. I used simply hxtop to get the total cpu usage.

Strange... though I've never run pacmd this with the usb dac attached. I'm going to experiment a bit and also to look into this in the evening if I will find the time.

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

It does that even without h-e-n and the DAC plugged in...

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

After reading pulse documentation I configured the USB device into pulse. Then pulse daemon just crashed when something is played back through. So I gave up on pulse and compliled moc for use with the external device.

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

Share it somewhere? Document it? It's pity, when such work - even if done just for Your use case - is lost/not used/someone must do same work again.

/Estel

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

I can share the moc binary. Is not packaged, but all required libs are already ported to maemo. As for pulse, I didn't succeed anyway.

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

kirillkk,

I had never heard of "moc", and it's not easy to Google, but I found this, is that it ? :
http://moc.daper.net/about

If I understand correctly, as you could not configure pulse to redirect the default audio output to USB, instead you chose to use a music player (moc) that can be (compiled ? configured ?) to use any ALSA output, like Oblomow did with his mplayer example.

I too would be interested in the moc binary, if only to experiment further with N900+DAC.

I like the idea of a lean, mean console player. I'm still trying to find out if it has a "shuffle all" function and if it can work with an untagged music collection, as this is my main use case...

Thanks for contributing !

EDIT: tried it out on Ubuntu, documentation is a bit fluffy, but the app looks good...

Works without tags, does shuffle well. Found a post on how to set the ALSA output in the config file... so yes, would be well worth trying out on the N900 !

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

Right. Moc configuration allows to specify alsa device.

Attached moc is compiled from "vanilla" 2.4.4 source on scratchbox. Enter key didn't work initially, so I added special enter key mapping both to the source and moc keymap configuration (n900_keymap in moc.tar.gz).

I don't remember which libraries are needed. I found the following debs in apt archives, they are probably needed by moc plugins.

libsamplerate0_0.1.3-1maemo0_armel.deb
libvorbis0a_1.2.3.tk1_armel.deb
libvorbisenc2_1.2.3.tk1_armel.deb
libvorbisfile3_1.2.3.tk1_armel.deb
libogg0_1%3a1.1.3-2.tk2_armel.deb
libresample1_0.1.3-5_armel.deb
libid3tag0_0.15.1b-10maemo1_armel.deb
libmad0_0.15.1b-2.1maemo1_armel.deb
libflac8_1.2.1-1.1maemo3_armel.deb

Installation script follows:
-------------------
tar xzf moc.tar.gz
cd moc
mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/moc/decoder_plugins
mv *.so /usr/local/lib/moc/decoder_plugins
mv mocp /usr/local/bin
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mocp /usr/bin/mocp
mkdir /home/user/.moc
mv config n900_keymap /home/user/.moc
cd ..
rmdir moc
-------------------

Re: [Announce] USB hostmode beta release
 

Thanks for sharing. OTOH, do we have any clue why redirecting *whole* audio to USB via pulseaudio doesn't work? AFAIK, it's point of pulseaudio as a whole...

/Estel