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Estel's Avatar
Posts: 5,028 | Thanked: 8,613 times | Joined on Mar 2011
#7
Thanks for Your incredibly detailed introduction, fpp. My 2 cents, if You don't mind:

1. Using N900 as audiophile-grade portable media player - or, in more technical words, a player that throws out digital audio data and left further steps to external components - is very great and important thing, yet, it's only one side of a coin. Another awesome benefit, is that using this (polished, more casual use-friendly, that is) we are able to actually record things in audiophile quality - basically, if we connect full-fledged mixer (with USB client), our lightweight, portable N900 isn't any worse than desktop PC. For people creating bootlegs from concerts (shows), or other situations, where sound quality is very important, yet portable size is a must, it's incredible. We got features, that normally require expensive and/or heavy devices, still more limited than our N900.

As for this purpose, I see only one possible limitation - lately reported, still *unconfirmed* (for 100%) limit of USB hostmode bandwidth (see hostmode thread for details, it was mentioned almost just before audio output discussion started). In any case, it shouldn't affect stereo recording, yet something like full 5.1 records (via USB mixer) could get hurt.

It's still possible, that this issue is non-existent, or fixable (unfortunately, on kernel implementation side, which require quite narrow area of knowledge, USB/kernel :/ ).

2. Back to audio-output:

Originally Posted by fpp View Post
Using GUI media players (like Maemo's, or Rockbox) requires redirecting the default sound output (managed by PulseAudio) to the ALSA device above.
Sounds simple in principle, but unfortunately has proved intractable up to now :-)

Then kirillkk chimed in with another solution : use MOC (mocp), a full-featured media player that happens to run in text mode, in the xterm console.
The output device can be specified in its configuration file, so it's start and play...

kirillkk provided his own build of MOC for Maemo, with some useful hints on how to install it.
After a few fumbles I got it to work, it is truly very usable !
I do have a few questions for him when he comes back, though :-)
While I greatly appreciate sharing of MOC solution, it's still not what we're looking for. First of all, it runs solely on CPU (like Oblomow's proof-of-concept with mplayer), so it doesn't use hardware acceleration for decoding, thus eating battery power much more greatly (and limit multitasking with CPU-heavy things). Second, I'm pretty convinced, that our current pulseaudio problems are some sort of hiccup originating from Maemo version limitations - no one thought, that any Maemo user will need to redirect system sounds via USB.

I'm absolutely sure, that experienced linux user (guru?) would be able to find worfkaround and/or problem solution - help in that matter is greatly, greatly appreciated. For now, maybe it's possible to bypass issue using Easy Debian in pure Squeeze version? Sulu was able to make pulseaudio working there, and leetnoob - many months ago - succeed in getting hardware accelerated playback in Easy Debian, via totem player and "some files" (can't recall what exactly, yet it's somewhere in Easy Debian thread) replaced with Maemo counterparts.

Using chroot environment (like Easy Debian) still isn't 100% optimal solution, yet achieving it would be also great thing, usable for day-to-day basics.

/Estel
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