Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hi, so I have. USB audio interface, a Scarlett 4i4, running to my laptop, which is running Fossapup64 9.5. I can see the device in the sound card wizard, but it has no sliders for control. I figured that's because it has hardware controls, so I turned them up, but I have no audio. The test sound doesn't play at all. The card regularly plays on windows, I'm just not sure what really to do with this though. Any help would be appreciated

gacklecrackle wrote: Tue Feb 28, 2023 2:49 am

Hi, so I have. USB audio interface, a Scarlett 4i4, running to my laptop, which is running Fossapup64 9.5. I can see the device in the sound card wizard, but it has no sliders for control. I figured that's because it has hardware controls, so I turned them up, but I have no audio. The test sound doesn't play at all. The card regularly plays on windows, I'm just not sure what really to do with this though. Any help would be appreciated

When you say you can see the card in the wizard but there are no controls, are you talking about the alsawizard terminal based control, or the retrovol gui control?

Did you run the "multiple sound card wizard" and choose that card? I use multiple sound cards in fossapup all the time, various usb audio interfaces, and sometimes the order of what to do and when to do it is elusive.

So first choose the card in multiple sound card wizard and press select, then click on it again to run the test sound. If the card is loaded as the default, the little speaker icon in the tray should show as with a red line through it, as there are no software controls to adjust volume.

Sometimes restarting the Xserver is necessary.

I have used an external USB sound card for years in different forms. The recipe below is what I used to use, These days I simply use a puppy with pulse audio which makes picking up the external source easy, or I install pupseaudio to fossapup64.

But to stick with ALSA...

There is a particular issue to overcome in getting the audio recognized by the hardware, and a configuration file needs to be edited.

1) Click on the Multiple Sound Card Wizard, and select the sound card which is to be the default device.

2) NOTE the Card / Device settings - in my case it is Card 2: Pro SB X-Fi, Device 0.

3) Using Leafpad or Geany open the alsa.config file, found in /user/share/alsa.
Add/Change the following pairs of lines as follows:

defaults.ctl.card 2
defaults.ctl.device 0

defaults.pcm.card 2
defaults.pcm.device 0

defaults.rawmidi.card 2
defaults.rawmidi.device 0

defaults.hwdep.card 2
defaults.hwdep.device 0

defaults.timer.card 2
defaults.timer.device 0

Save the changes by clicking on the SAVE button on the top menu.

4) You also need to check that the configuration is correct for the Hardware, by opening up the configuration files for Retrovol and selecting Config Window. Ensure the numbered sound card matches what was noted in step 2: eg for Card 2 it would look like hw:2.
Click on Apply.

Hopefully the sound input/output will then be available through the external Sound Card.

I have 3 USB sound cards in total. 2 are the dedicated cards for USB headphones - one wired, one wireless - and built-in to the rather chunky 'plugs". The other one is a simple, USB P'n'P audio card with analogue 3.5 mm connectors for microphone & headphones.

My guess is that all 3 use a similar type of chip, since they all have just two controls.....PCM, and Mic Level. All 3 are picked up immediately by the MultipleSoundcardWizard, and are very easy to set as 'default'.

So much so, in fact, that I built my own YAD-based "QuickAudioSwap" GUI utility, which via the use of 'pre-set' .retrovolrc config files, and an 'on-the-fly' restart of Retrovol itself allows me to swap cards quickly and easily without the need to re-boot. Well; it works for me, at any rate......though it does require a single, initial 'manual' set-up run before using it in earnest, to create those 'pre-set' .retrovolrc files. Once this has been done, it works as sweet as a nut ever after...

Mike.