[pulseaudio-discuss] Recipe and/or help with Pandaboard setup

[Shawn Ferris]

Hi All --

I was wondering whether someone had a known working recipe for getting
pulseaudio working on a pandaboard. (rev 2) (IE: kernel used, alsa/pa
configuration, etc)

I'm using build-root to create my image and I struggled for a while to
get audio working at all, and just when I thought I had everything
working, there's one piece that I've not been able to overcome. My
requirements are small, so I hesitate using something like the ubuntu
images (I don't need a GUI) and I really do wanna piece things
together to get a better understanding how everything works together.

My problem is this:

I can play a test tone and capture the audio from my USB FM Radio and
push it to the sound card, with gstreamer and alsa directly. IE:

$ gst-launch alsasrc device=hw:1 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! alsasink

And with pulseaudio, I can hear the test tone:

$ gst-launch audiotestsrc ! audioconvert ! pulsesink

But, when I try to repeat the capture/stream from the FM Radio to the
soundcard using pulseaudio, it seems to be working, but I can't hear
anything. IE:

$ gst-launch pulsesrc ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! pulsesink
Setting pipeline to PAUSED ...
Pipeline is live and does not need PREROLL ...
Setting pipeline to PLAYING ...
New clock: GstAudioSrcClock

If I turn right around and kill pulseaudio and try again using alsa
directly, it's fine?!

One of the things I was struggling with in the beginning was the
device discovery. When the udev or builtin discovery scanned the
devices, I would get tons of errors, a sound card left in an unusable
state and pulse would crash following the scan. That leaves me having
to force the devices and disable the discovery from default.pa:

--- alsa --

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [Panda          ]: OMAP4 - Panda
                      TI OMAP4 Board
 1 [Music          ]: USB-Audio - ADS InstantFM Music


--- default.pa ---

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:1,0

.. snip ..

#### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
#.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
#load-module module-udev-detect
#.else
#### Use the static hardware detection module (for systems that lack
udev/hal support)
#load-module module-detect
#.endif

One suggest from IRC was to try UCM, so I also downloaded the UCM
patches for pulse and alsa and tried that. This was better as
pulseaudio would start, but the sound card was still left in an
unusable state and I'd get nothing but under run errors when trying to
run the tests.. I even removed the HDMI drivers (i'm more interested
in the analog, but both would be ideal) and set the default sink to
the analog device, to no avail. I could never get even a test tone
working through pulse in this configuration. So, I decided to go back
to the above configuration because I'm at least marginally working
hoping I can continue to work through the issues. Of course, if UCM is
the future, that would be preferred, but anything working at this
point is good with me. :D

Anyway.. I'm hoping someone can shed some light on what I'm missing,
or a working configuration they're using. I'm at a loss at what to do
next. BTW, I'm using kernel-ti-ubuntu-3.1-1282.5.tar.gz in my image. I
tried a stock kernel, but it wouldn't even register my sound cards.
(both a 3.1 and 3.2 series, I think) As well as various other linaro
kernels.

Thanks for any help you can provide! Below are some links to
additional info / logs I recorded..

pulse/alsa/dbus startup/info: http://pastebin.com/BbYsZLZr
working test tone with pulse: http://pastebin.com/NuqR4f1y
working radio capture/stream without pulse: http://pastebin.com/gaF6Ehie
non working radio capture/stream with pulse: http://pastebin.com/KCqjJB92


Thanks again!
Shawn