Older blog entries for Uraeus (starting at number 438)

Continued my fight against my USB Sound card and starting to make some positive progress. Turns out the crasher bug of GNOME Mixer was solved by Ronald before the 2.10 release. Problem is that it doesn't really let me adjust whats needed out of the box. Turns out I can adjust this through the preferences menu, but I think it should display inteligent sliders right away. I guess this would need to be handled through HAL someway and with some soundcard profiles.

Also discovered that the way to make Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 NX play sound without distortion is to have ALSA resample my sound to 48000 instead of the default 44100. Some .asoundrc plunking solved that. Once again something which I guess we need to get HAL to take care of.

Another bug I found is that if you unplug the soundcard, the plug it back in, it seems its adress changes. Which means your settings aimed at card number 2 doesn't work anymore as your card is now number 3.

Multimedia track

So there will be a multimedia summit at GUADEC in Stuttgart this year. Managed to pull together a rather nice team of speakers for the Multimedia track with topics such as Theora/Xiph, Dirac, Annodex, Flumotion and GStreamer. Hopefully a lot of people outside the traditional GNOME camp will be interested in coming to parttake in this track.

I put together a small presentation of the talks. Anyone reading this and have a interest in Multimedia should check out the program and hopefully decide to come.

The call from bellow

Wim and Wingo have both been looking into trying to fix stuff in glib as our new extensive testsuite for GStreamer 0.9 is showing some bottlenecks and problems. The fixes are aimed at more threadsafety and higher performance mostly. Think they have some nice things cooked up and if they manage to get them all done and merged upstream it will mean a nice performance boost for not only GStreamer, but also for anything else using glib, including of course GNOME.

We need more people

We are looking to hire 1-2 more people at Fluendo. We are at this point mainly looking for Python hackers to work on our streaming server and the services around the streaming server. So if you are a python hacker and are willing to move to Barcelona (or are already living there) to join the coolest company in the Open Source world make sure to mail Thomas (at fluendo.com) or mail me and I forward it to Thomas. Strong general python experience is of course the most important, but specific knowledge of twisted, gstreamer, streaming technologies and/or pygtk and so on doesnt harm your application of course :)

I bought an external Sound Blaster Audigy NX2 sound card recently to use with my laptop. Discovered it do everything apart from just working. Think I will spend some time over the coming weeks trying to file bug reports and talk with maintainers of various pieces of the puzzle to see if I can get this working correctly under Linux and GNOME. The ideal experience would have been to plug in the USB soundcard to the laptop. Get a dialog popping up saying an external soundcard got connected and if I wanted my GNOME applications to use it for default sound output. When I later unplug the soundcard the default would go back to the builtin soundcard of the laptop.

What actually happened is this. Plugged in soundcard. Needed to run Fedora sound config to detect and configure it. Needed to manually edit the gconf key in gstreamer to use the external soundcard or manually configure XMMS to use it. Had no sound. Tried running the gst-mixer, crashed - googled and found others have same problem. Ran alsa-mixer and tried unmuting stuff. After some googling I found the right combination of muting/unmuting to get sound out. Sound now playing but highly distorted, maybe a driver bug or some volume setting that needs adjusting, needs further investigation :). Tried unplugging the USB soundcard, keyboard stopped working....

So I will spend some time figuring out what the problems are and filling bug reports around various places. I think this is a good example of where a non-coder can make a difference as these kind of issues demand that you have the hardware in question, the problem space relates to multiple modules and programs and as such you need to do some investigation and file bugs and work with maintainers across modules to make it work nicely. Filing a bug one place will at best solve a small part of the issue, but the thing here is to start at the bottom then work upwards towards the GUI. Already talked to David Zeuthen and it turns out soundcard detection comes with HAL 0.5 (which will ship with Fedora Core 4) I also bug in Red Hat bugzilla on the issue of borking my keyboard when uplugging USB and one against gnome-media in GNOME bugzilla on the issue of the mixer crashing with the soundcard (seems Ronald might have fixed that one already).

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