[pulseaudio-discuss] Failure to create alsa source

[Jenn and Alan Atherton]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net>wrote:

> On Sat, 27.02.10 02:43, Jenn and Alan Atherton (theathertons at gmail.com)
> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am having trouble getting the microphone on my webcam to work with
> pulse.
> > What's odd is that it works just fine with ALSA, and pulse sees the
> device
> > (and gives it a mono input profile), but at some point the input source
> > isn't available.  I am using Ubuntu 9.10, but with pulseaudio 0.9.21 and
> > ALSA 1.0.22 from an unstable repository.  I believe it's something in the
> > pulseaudio side of things, since the device works fine with ALSA directly
> > (e.g., through audacity).  I want to get it working with pulse, though,
> for
> > Skype, which fairly recently moved to pulse exclusively.  I'm hoping this
> > isn't a bug and merely a configuration issue, but I am not savvy with
> alsa
> > or pulse, so I don't know what/where to tweak.  The critical lines in the
> > pulse output are the last few that I've included in the long
> (post-message)
> > excerpt from pulseaudio -vvv
> >
> > W: alsa-util.c: Unable to set sw params: No such device
> > E: alsa-source.c: Failed to set software parameters: No such device
>
>
> http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-lib.git;a=commitdiff;h=f1713475087027925358c3f9dd3db70723ed8d11
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566289
>
> Lennart
>
>
Wonderful!  I couldn't have hoped to get a better reply.  This solved the
problem.  For others who find this trail with the same problem, I ended up
downgrading the pulseaudio and alsa packages to the latest standard Ubuntu
repositories to start from.  Then I downloaded the latest stable alsa
sources, made the change referred to in the links above, and compiled and
installed.  The following guide makes the process very straightforward,
although anyone capable of compiling source will find no trouble:
http://monespaceperso.org/blog-en/2009/12/17/upgrade-alsa-1-0-22-on-ubuntu-karmic-koala-9-10/

On a related note, I tried plugging the webcam into another machine also
running Ubuntu 9.10, and it worked just fine on a fairly generic install.
So I would guess it's some sort of configuration or particular hardware
conflict that brings this bug to the surface.  Very strange.

Thank you again for the fast response and the fix!
- Alan
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