Hi,
I just downloaded the latest Ubuntu Live CD (10.04) to try my app on it. It is a plain X11 app using ALSA for sound output. I developed it on openSUSE 11.2 and thought to give it a try on Ubuntu... that was a mistake, because on Ubuntu, there seem to be lots of errors with ALSA. Here are some observations:
1) snd_pcm_status_get_tstamp() always returns 0 for sec/usec.
2) snd_pcm_status_get_state() always returns SND_PCM_STATE_RUNNING, even when the PCM stream has long reached a buffer underrun.
3) snd_pcm_delay()'s return value doesn't fall below ~7000 samples or so. Even when the buffer has underrun, the return value is not 0 but about ~7000 samples. This makes it nearly impossible to detect when I should start writing new samples to the buffer...
Could someone enlighten me what's going on there? Is this a known issue with Ubuntu? I'm not using any weird addons or stuff. It's really just the latest Ubuntu live CD. As I said, on openSUSE everything is working just fine. But on Ubuntu, hell is really breaking loose here...
Thanks for help,
Andreas