[alsa-devel] ERROR: USB Sound card with unsafe characters

[Brian Jones]

Newby alert -  but I don't know how to get this bug to the developers

I have been trying to work on a fix for Bug 1498129 -
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/1498129  on
Ubuntu

My USB soundcard is an Asus Xonar U7 Echelon Edition
<https://www.asus.com/Sound-Cards/Xonar_U7_Echelon_Edition/> which
identifies itself to alsa as "Xonar U7 Echelon Ed." The card is supported
by alsa and works well in analog mode but I cannot get digital output via
alsa.

It has iec958 as device 1 rather than device 0 and I can access digital
output by referring to directly to hw:x,1 but cannot access digital output
via alsa.

Attempts to change the iec958 device in USB-Audio.conf fail because of the
period char and apparently my level of OS (Mint 17.3 based on Ubuntu 14.04,
kernel 3.19.0-32) does not have alsa supporting USB vendorid:productid
naming so I don't have a workaround.

If a patch exists, advice on applying/rebuilding alsa would be gratefully
appreciated.