[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH v2] alsa: Add support for sound cards with 4-channel input.

[David Henningsson]

2012-05-07 20:06, Arun Raghavan skrev:
> On Mon, 2012-05-07 at 13:02 -0700, David Henningsson wrote:
>> 2012-05-07 03:47, Tanu Kaskinen skrev:
>>> On Mon, 2012-05-07 at 09:46 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 2012-05-01 at 20:09 +0300, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
>>>>> Changes in v2:
>>>>>    - Call the mapping a generic 4-channel input mapping
>>>>>      instead of a 4-channel mic array mapping. The mapping
>>>>>      will be used also by sound cards that have two stereo
>>>>>      input jacks, so in those cases talking about mic arrays
>>>>>      is wrong.
>>>>>    - Added a comment about using the "hw" device name.
>>>>>
>>>>> BugLink: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45813
>>>>> ---
>>>>>    src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c                    |    1 +
>>>>>    src/modules/alsa/mixer/profile-sets/default.conf |    9 +++++++++
>>>>>    2 files changed, 10 insertions(+)
>>>>>
>>>>> diff --git a/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c b/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c
>>>>> index abb12ee..8b54f75 100644
>>>>> --- a/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c
>>>>> +++ b/src/modules/alsa/alsa-mixer.c
>>>>> @@ -3888,6 +3888,7 @@ static int mapping_verify(pa_alsa_mapping *m, const pa_channel_map *bonus) {
>>>>>            { "analog-surround-61",     N_("Analog Surround 6.1") },
>>>>>            { "analog-surround-70",     N_("Analog Surround 7.0") },
>>>>>            { "analog-surround-71",     N_("Analog Surround 7.1") },
>>>>> +        { "analog-4-channel-input", N_("Analog 4-channel Input") },
>>>> Since this is limited to some specific hardware, shouldn't we set up
>>>> udev rules instead of always probing?
>>> "All devices supporting 4-channel input" isn't very specific hardware
>>> IMHO,
>> I agree with Arun on this one. Besides, it is not obvious to me what the
>> channel mapping should be either, and couldn't that vary between
>> different 4-channel hardware? Is the aux* just causing all inputs to be
>> added for whatever the client wants to have...?
>>
>>> and I doubt udev can be used to query the amount of supported
>>> channels.
>> Hmm...that raises a thought I didn't consider before. Why don't we do
>> this in alsa-lib? If this varies between devices, we could create e g,
>> for 4-channel mic hardware A, we set up a alsa-lib ttable to have
>> "front" record two channels, the two left ones mixing in to the left and
>> the two right ones mixing into the right. Or in what way do we actually
>> use all four channels today?
> The separate mics may eventually be useful for beamforming and
> associated processing. Would your approach require changes to alsa-lib
> again if we wanted to do that? If yes, it might be better to let
> PulseAudio take care of this.
The attached patch (untested!) would just add the possibility to do a 
four-to-two channel mixdown when you open front:%f (for the cards 
explicitly selected in the patch), so for four-channel beamforming you 
could still open hw:%f in four channel mode.

// David

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