Speech-friendly alsa mixer (sam) released, another update

Fri Apr 12 15:07:56 EDT 2019

Hi Janina,
Responses inline below:

On Fri, 12 Apr 2019, Janina Sajka wrote:

> [The e-mail server of the sender could not be verified (SPF Record)]
>
> Hi, Willem:
>
> Got it working now on Arch.
>
> I was a bit befuddled at first with the 5 sound cards presented by
> arrowing on the first screen. I got, pch, device, hedset av710, and
> lastly UR22mkII.
>
> It took a minute to grok that pch was the builtin Intel810, and that
> Device was my CE-Media USB "device." Maybe it's just a first time
> reaction, but I was wondering about numbering them? Not suggesting that,
> just thinking aloud at this point.
My feeling is that one should try to stay away from displaying things like 
the card index number by default.
If one finds that two cards has the same name, e.g. pch occurs twice, we 
must do something though.
There is a long name, but that seem to have no fixed format and includes 
stuff like pci address, IRQ etc.
That, again is too much.
Maybe some way of querying the long name with a keypress?

>
> I did come upon an error that I should explain before posting the
> output.
>
> I have a sixth card present that has not been working with recent
> kernels. It's my original RME Multiface that I've had for some 15 years
> now. I'm not sure why alsa sometimes sees it, and sometimes doesn't.
> lspci lists it, but also currently doesn't see it. It's defined as card
> 4 in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf.
>
> The sixth card is showing up in sam as the fifth, the Yamaha UR22mkII
> which is defined as hw:5 in alsa.conf.  Selecting it gets:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/local/bin/sam", line 206, in <module>
>      mixers=alsaaudio.mixers(card)
>      alsaaudio.ALSAAudioError: No such file or directory [hw:4]
The best I can promis you here is a nicer error message so that the 
program does at least not crash.
What I have added, are tests to try and handle coming and going cards 
better.

>
> So, what I'm surmising is that any of my 3 USB audio cards, if pulled,
> might similarly confuse things. I'll plan on testing this. At the moment
> getting at "Device" and "Headset" to do the test is physically awkward.
The tests I added should allow you to plug and unplug USB cards.
Obviously, If one is working on a control of a card and unplug it when 
busy with that, you will get an error, but I hope the program does not 
crash then.
Kind Regards, Willem >
> Best,
>
> Janina
>
>
> Willem van der Walt writes:
>> Hi Janina and all,
>> I just did another update.
>> What happened is that when there is more than one card, the mixers/controls
>> of the second /20th card would be correctly listed, but when grabbing its
>> details, the program got the control by the same name from the default
>> soundcard.
>> This last update hopefully resolvs that issue.
>> If you missed this Janina, the program's latest version now works on both
>> python2 and 3, 3 being the default on arch.
>> You should therefore just need to install the latest version of pyalsaaudio
>> for python3 on arch.
>> When installing through pip, as suggested in the readme, replace pip with
>> pip3 to get the python module for python3 installed.
>> All testers should download again as I fixed the multiple card issue just
>> before writing this email.
>> wget http://www.sanote.co.za/downloads/sam-latest.tar.bz2
>> is possibly the most painless.  Just keep in mind that wget will add a dot
>> one at the end of the file if it already exists, so first delete it.
>> I got hold of a USB soundcard now, so can now test as I go along.
>> Kind regards, Willem
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 11 Apr 2019, Janina Sajka wrote:
>>
>>> [The e-mail server of the sender could not be verified (SPF Record)]
>>>
>>> Thanks, Chuck! I'm also on Arch, so you just resolved the first issue I
>>> encountered.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Janina
>>>
>>> Chuck Hallenbeck writes:
>>>> Hi Willem,
>>>>
>>>> I am using arch, and had to use pyalsaaudio from the AUR to satisfy the
>>>> requirements for sam, but on first executing it, I get this:
>>>>
>>>> [groucho at workshop ~]$ sam
>>>>   File "/usr/local/bin/sam", line 152
>>>>     print ''
>>>>            ^
>>>> SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean
>>>> print('')?
>>>> [groucho at workshop ~]$
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Any suggestions? Looks like an interesting idea.
>>>>
>>>> Chuck
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Here In Northeast Ohio, The Moon is Waxing Crescent (25% of Full)
>>>> If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.
>>>> Sent from Lula's missing iPhone.
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>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Janina Sajka
>>>
>>> Linux Foundation Fellow
>>> Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org
>>>
>>> The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
>>> Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa
>>>
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>
> -- 
>
> Janina Sajka
>
> Linux Foundation Fellow
> Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org
>
> The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
> Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa
>
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