[alsa-devel] Spurious "Unable to find definition 'defaults.pcm.dmix.device'"

[Raymond Yau]

2010/9/20 Gavin Stark <gavin at gstark.com>

> I am using ALSA in a gstreamer project.  When playing many videos (with
> audio) in the same application and the same gstreamer instance every once in
> a while (maybe once every 500 times) I will receive the following errors (in
> a call chain that passes through snd_pcm_open)
>
> confmisc.c:1286:snd_func_refer: alsalib error: Unable to find definition
> 'defaults.pcm.dmix.device'
> alsa conf.c:4154:_snd_config_evaluate: alsalib error: function
> snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
> alsa conf.c:4633:snd_config_expand: alsalib error: Evaluate error: No such
> file or directory
> alsa pcm.c:2211:snd_pcm_open_noupdate: alsalib error: Unknown PCM default
>
> The next playback will be fine.  Looking through the ALSA code it seems
> that the configuration data should be cached and re-used unless the number
> of config files changes, or the files themselves change (name, device,
> inode. mtime)  So I am wonder why on one instance of snd_pcm_open I'd end up
> with this error but not on most previous or subsequent calls.
>
> All the ALSA configuration files are the defaults, I have no ~/.asoundrc,
> and I'm running version 1.0.23
>
> Thank you,
> Gavin Stark
>
> which distribution are you using ?

if your "default" PCM want to find "defaults.pcm.dmix.device" which is
defined in alsa-lib/src/alsa/alsa.conf

defaults.pcm.dmix.device defaults.pcm.device

AFAIK, Mandriva 2010/2010 spring can be reconfigued to use dmix/dsnoop
instead of pulseaudio

But I have no idea how Mandriva 's alsa-lib support "default:0" and
"default:1"