[alsa-devel] [Audacity-devel] distortion with alsa I/O - no distortion with oss emulation

[Lee Revell]

On 4/7/07, Simon Lewis <simon.lewis at mnet-online.de> wrote:
> Dear Alsa developers
>
> Audacity seems to work perfectly with AOSS and Jack but not directly
> with ALSA on some linux PCs. Trying to use ALSA directly leads to severe
> distortion due to lack of sync with Alsa. (I hope that is the correct
> terminology.)
>
> I received this reply from the Audacity developers, what tools are
> available from ALSA to investigate this problem? How can I determine
> what the real "Alsa configuration" is that portaudio has used setting up
> communication with Alsa.

Please try to narrow it down some.  What hardware/kernel/distro
versions work OK and which don't?  Especially important is the
motherboard chipset, ALSA version and exact make/model of soundcard.

My guess is that different soundcards default to different
period/buffer config values, and that Audacity wrongly assumes the
buffer/period size it gets from ALSA by default is sane on all
hardware.

Lee