alsasrc use-driver-timestamps (was: Selecting alsasrc slave-method: resample not implemented?)

[Michiel Konstapel]

On Tuesday 01 November 2022 14:11:05 (+01:00), Nicolas Dufresne wrote:

> Le mardi 01 novembre 2022 à 10:13 +0000, Michiel Konstapel via gstreamer-devel a
> écrit :
> > Forgive me for ranting.... These undocumented and
> > unimplemented methods/properties make me worry: am I just looking for ghosts?
> > Does this all Just Work for everyone and should I just leave things at the
> > defaults and move on? Many elements expose properties that seem like they
> > involve important tradeoffs to make given a specific use case, but then give
> > no information on what the various options do and especially *why/when* you
> > would want them. Although they seem important, they are hardly mentioned on
> > the mailing list. Source diving sometimes turns up some code or comments, or
> > sometimes it just turns out that the exposed knob doesn't even do anything :-/
> > Does this mean I have ventured into an area where I'm not supposed to be, or
> > is this legitimately missing functionality/documentation?
> >
> > Not saying that I don't hugely appreciate all the work that's gone into
> > gstreamer, and I love hacking on this stuff, but boy does it get frustrating
> > at times!
>
> I believe commercial implementation, were this strongly matter will change a HW
> PLL to adjust the HW clock to their system/network clock. This should happen in
> combination of slave-method=none on the source and slave-method=custom on the
> sink. Be aware that I have never implemented such an advanced solution myself.
>
> The alternative would be dynamic software resampling, see slave-method=resample
> in alsasink, but this has been broken for age, and we don't have anyone working
> on it. Audio servers like PipeWire and PulseAudio might already handle this
> transparently, that might explain why only alsasrc/sink users reports this.




Thanks Nicolas!


Since we're not playing back the audio locally but only streaming it over the network, there are no audio sinks involved. We have multiple sources streaming to a central mixer, so I think it's up to each individual source to sync its audio samples to the NTP system time. We are using wireless USB microphones which don't appear to have any controls for finetuning their sampling rates.


Does someone on the list have any advice on how to approach this? Should we be using pulsesrc instead of alsasrc? Are there any existing elements that will do the software resampling? I found https://gstreamer-devel.narkive.com/oUoa2zeg/asynchrounous-audio-sample-rate-conversion-with-gstreamer but the thread ends just as it gets interesting ;-)


Down-the-rabbit-holingly yours,
Michiel
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