I am trying to set up a USB sound bar on someone else's laptop running ubuntu 10.10 with a gnome desktop.
Since it did not work out of the box, I thought I'd first enhance my non-existent skills in this area by first practicising on my machine with debian ‘lenny’ and no DE environment. I discovered rather quickly that what goes on behind the scenes is that said sound bar is (emulates?) an additional sound card. As a result, I have to direct each program that produces some form or other of sound output to use the second audio device rather than the default builtin sound card. I am able to get ‘mplayer’ to do this but I have no idea how I could convince the flash plugin behind my web browser to do this, for instance. Is there any way I can make the sound bar the system's default and be done with it? While testing, I tried redirection when launching programs from the bash prompt -- i.e. adding ‘/dev/dsp > /dev/dsp1’ -- with unsatisfactory results: below par sound quality, loud cracks, the speakers go silent for brief periods of time, etc. I do not have access to the other laptop right now, but I would assume gnome has some sort of GUI that lets you specify your default device ‘system-wide’? Another thing I noticed is that the volume button on the sound bar does not work: I have to start alsamixer to control the volume, which is not optimal. Does this mean that I am using a default generic audio USB driver for this device and that I should look for something a bit more specific that might support additional hardware features? While I am at it I thought I might as well learn how these things work and stop guessing :-) Is there a reliable up-to-date document that you would recommend reading? Thanks, cj P.S. I refrained from posting the 3 pages output by ‘lsusb -vs’. Not sure if that would help at this point. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20101206164243.gd3...@turki.gavron.org
