[pulseaudio-discuss] Alsa output devices, able to use alsa plugin?

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 11:39 +0300, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> ke, 2009-08-26 kello 15:39 +0800, Ng Oon-Ee kirjoitti:
> > Anyway, I have the above (with slave changed to plug:front:0 as
> > suggested) in my .asoundrc. Once again, aplay -D equal works fine. When
> > I try load-module module-alsa-sink device=equal:-
> > 
> > [ngoonee at ngoonee-laptop ~]$ pactl load-module module-alsa-sink
> > device=equal
> > Failure: Module initalization failed
> > 
> > Besides the typo there (initialization, not initalization), somehow it
> > doesn't want to load my device. Any ideas? Am on alsa 1.0.20 and Pulse
> > 0.9.15 (will be getting 0.9.16 soon, when the final release is done).
> 
> There should be more error messages about loading the module in the
> daemon log. They might be informative enough to tell what went wrong.
> See /var/log/syslog.
> 

My syslog is empty.

errors.log gives
Aug 26 16:41:54 ngoonee-laptop pulseaudio[7739]: module.c: Failed to
load  module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device=equal"):
initialization failed.


On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 11:41 +0300, Tanu Kaskinen wrote: 
> ke, 2009-08-26 kello 15:42 +0800, Ng Oon-Ee kirjoitti:
> > Ah, forgot the last bit.
> > > 
> > > There are other approaches to equalization, but I don't feel like going
> > > in the details of those if this works for you. If you're interested, I
> > > just point you to this:
> > > https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-August/004730.html
> > > 
> > 
> > I read about this when it was posted, but my impression was that this
> > was similar to the ladspa plugin for alsa, meaning its a fixed equalizer
> > and not a runtime-modifiable one. Is this correct, or was I just making
> > nonsense assumptions?
> 
> It is runtime-modifiable. The GUI (qpaeq) that is mentioned in the mail
> is used to control the equalization parameters in realtime.

That's interesting, and I'll look into it in future perhaps. For now,
I'm more interested to find out why this doesn't work on my system. It
may be a more general problem, as I was trying such outputs as:-

pcm.test {
  type plug
  slave { pcm "hw:0,0" }
}

Which should work, since it doesn't even do anything. I get the same
error message trying to load it up though. Could somebody test this out
(just have the above in your .asoundrc and try to use 'test' as the
device for module-alsa-sink.