I have been trying to use a Digidesign Mbox 2 Mini (USB) without success, but with some positive signs.

The device is detected. From the software side, playback appears to work -- both aplay and mplayer push audio to somewhere (no crashes, and at the correct rate). But there is no sound from any of the outputs.

Recording is not so good. It does not error or crash, but arecord hangs and creates a 44 byte file containing the WAV header. In a test program, snd_pcm_readi() does not return and strace waits on poll().

I found two threads on alsa-devel referring to the Mbox interfaces (a different model to the one I am using though; different ID):

http://mailman.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2007-November/004394.ht... http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg12273.html

In the second one, which is from 2004, Clemens says:

Strange. But having two endpoints in one interface is not what the driver was written for. I think part of the driver needs to be rewritten before this device can work.

Now this is a while ago, with a different interface. But the Mbox 2 mini also has two endpoints in one interface (see attached lsusb output), and I seem to be getting considerably more out of the interface than the original poster.

So is it possible that the driver is now successfully getting audio to the playback endpoint only, and just needs some kind of mixer device control (or similar) for playback to work? Or is the 'success' with aplay/mplayer misleading -- how far off working is this?

Thanks,