[pulseaudio-discuss] Some info on the RME Hammerfall DSP

[David Kastrup]

I have had very limited success finding any information about what to do
about the RME Hammerfall DSP Multiface II card in connection with
Pulseaudio (running on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04).

Basically, the best advice I had been able to find has been putting the
lines

load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=dsp_out device=hw:DSP format=s32le channels=18 channel_map=left,right,aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3,aux4,aux5,aux6,aux7,aux8,aux9,aux10,aux11,aux12,aux13,aux14,aux15 tsched=0
load-module module-alsa-source source_name=dsp_in device=hw:DSP format=s32le channels=18 channel_map=left,right,aux0,aux1,aux2,aux3,aux4,aux5,aux6,aux7,aux8,aux9,aux10,aux11,aux12,aux13,aux14,aux15 tsched=0

into the default configuration.  That works reasonably well, but one
gets glitches most particularly when playing Flash audio.

I just now figured out that removing the tsched=0 lines works fine as
long as you run

    amixer -D hw:DSP cset numid=23 on

before starting pulseaudio.

    amixer -D hw:DSP cget numid=23

now displays

numid=23,iface=CARD,name='Precise Pointer'
  ; type=BOOLEAN,access=rw------,values=1
  : values=on

where the default is 'off'.  Which does not appear to disturb Jack.  But
pulseaudio most certainly does not seem to like it, with tsched=1
suffering much worse than tsched=0.

Setting this to 'On' makes pulseaudio work worse with tsched=0, and
apparently have no problems with tsched=1.

All this is rather crazy, and I have no idea where to report it such
that a future version of Ubuntu will run out of the box.

Is there any way I can get Pulseaudio to set this particular control
when opening the hw:DSP device?

Thanks

-- 
David Kastrup