Exactly, same thoughts here. What "plug and play" mean here? I doubt that PA reconfigured itself to redirect all sound there... Have You used stock media player (or OMP, shouldn't matter in this case)? Or just mplayer via terminal?

/Estel

So, I did a few experiments with gstreamer, but without much success. But maybe someone finds this useful, though.

First, one needs to install the gstreamer0.10-alsa package:

this adds an gstreamer plugin for alsa outout/input. One can now play e.g. a mp3 file back using the appropriate gstreamer-pipeline:

Probably gstreamer does this with dsp-assisted decoding, but I guess the main cause for battery drain is the host mode part itself, so it does not seem to help much.

I did not manage to play anything through usb with Maemo apps, nor found a way to set an system wide standard sink. Some website proposed to use
but it seems like Maemo apps do not rely on this.

So, not so useful for playback, but could be nice for recording directly in ogg or flac using a gstreamer pipeline.

It seems however like rockbox is using gstreamer, and has "pulsesink" as output sink hardcoded (http://git.rockbox.org/?p=rockbox.gi...cm-gstreamer.c), so one could try to change this and recompile (or ask the author to make it configurable somehow).

Does anyone know if there's a way to force apps using gstreamer to a special sink? Or make autoaudiosink redirecting to it?

I used mplayer from the command-line with an ao alsa option... No clue how to set up the stock media player etc, but at least the drivers worked.

Ah, OK, some same method as previously, only with different hardware.

I guess streaming sound as PCM through USB (in or out) is the same for any client device that has the capability, and power kernel supports that, so just about anything should work.

Multifunction devices (like Estel card which also does video editing, TV etc.) would probably require drivers for non-sound functions.

Thanks for your continued efforts Oblomow ! Maemo certainly doesn't make this stuff easy for us, compared to standard desktop Linux...

Aha, well spotted !
I will chime in the question in the Rockbox thread, although I'm not sure the original porter is still active here...

Confirmed: both issues fixed

Finally I got time to unplug all cables from my desktop, and test Audigy 2ZS Video Editor with N900 - fpp was right, in fact it works as audio device (+ 4 port, powered USB 2.0 HUB, that is bundled inside), leaving only video capabilities for proprietary drivers = inaccessible.

I've tested it with mplayer terminal command, and it worked as expected. So, I've tried smplayer, and guess what, it *works* flawlessly!

smplayer is great mplayer front-end available from repositories. Of course, as it's still mplayer, it doesn't allow to use DSP assist in decoding... Yet, its using GUI and settings, to allow doing every thing that you can do with mplayer via terminal (at least, things that I'm aware of), adding to it every function that You would expect from GUI media player, like manipulating playlists, normalizing volume etc.

it's no different when it comes to selecting output audio device - I was able to choose my USB sound card via GUI drop-down list. Fortunately, no one decided that this option should be cut off while porting to Maemo "as no one could ever use it at the time of porting [it seems to me, that it was ported before hostmode become available]" - kudos for original creator/porting dev.

Furthermore, in my case it uses exact same amount of CPU time to decode, as when using N900's internal DAC. To be precise - mplayer process itself uses more CPU with external DAC, yet, with internal DAC, CPU cycles are "divided" between mplayer and pulseaudio. I've tested many times, and result were the same - 60-61% @500 mhz when decoding Q=6, VBR, lowpass=20kHz ogg file. At first, this part of my findings seems to be opposite to Oblomow research, yet, I'm not sure if "dividing" CPU cycles between mplayer and pulseaudio (when using internal DAC) was considered there (?).
---

So, there is comfortable way to use external DAC with GUI - I think that main idea can be considered as achieved, and that concludes trying to compile some other (also non using DSP) players, as obsolete.

Of course, we still need to figure out how to use external card with OMP (or stock player, whatever), utilizing MAFW DSP-assisted decoding. Also, it would be great to figure some similarly easy way to record audio from mixer with stereo (and up) microphones. Heck, even my mentioned card got plentora of IN's (jacks, line-ins, optical-in, MIDI or whatsnot), and I have no idea - yet - how to determine which one is (to be) used, when recording via terminal.

/Estel

for some background on similar application, many of us have been recording 24-bit 96khz spdif with dell axims for almost a decade using a PDAudio compact flash card audio interface. ive used this same card to record to a $200 old notebook with a cfcard/pcmcia adapter and alsa drivers with ecasound command line. this was before the dawn of decent USB audio solutions, of which there are now many...

im no script kiddie, but ecasound should easily port to N900

An older version (2.7.0) of ecasound is installable via Easy Debian. Seems to be very interesting, but I did not find the time yet to dive deeper into it. But as audacity records through usb from Easy Debian, I guess ecasound is also able to use external deivecs via alsa.

Wait, wait - audacity records from alsa external USB soundcard without problems in ED? I must have missed it. It's great news!

I wonder if totemplayer (with leetnoob's hacks to enable accelerated playback in it) in ED can easily use external sound card. Will try to check that, as time permits (not to much time those days, hardly enough to keep in pace with TMO and great ideas like that).

/Estel