Re: Mac mini sound

[Hisham Muhammad <hisham.hm@gmail.com>]

On 9/20/05, Roger Leigh <rleigh@whinlatter.ukfsn.org> wrote:
> Andrzej Mendel <amendel@wp.pl> writes:
>
> > AFAIK Mac Mini's mixer is not supported yet or there is none (BenH
> > posted here that he couldn't find one). Audio output (w/o hardware
> > mixing) works very well in 2.6.12, and playing multiple streams is
> > possible with help of "dmix" ALSA plugin (well tested by me :). ALSA
> > should enable it by default, by in my case it didn't.
>
> Please could you share your asound.conf to show us how to enable it?

After some experimentation I just got a working setup in my
~/.asoundrc (iBook G4 July2005 here, snd_powermac), follows below. 
Thanks Ben for the softvol tip which inspired me to go through the
dmix dance again. Strangely, two device nodes were missing which
mplayer required in order to cooperate: (my mplayer and alsa-libs are
self-compiled, so take it with a grain of salt, but keep in mind in
case things don't work at first)

mknod /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p c 116 16
mknod /dev/snd/timer c 116 33

And here are the contents of my ~/.asoundrc. A new slider, "hw", shows
up in alsamixer to control softvol. Tried dmix with two simultaneous
mplayers, works fine. It would be nice to make softvol take over the
"Master" slider, but I don't know if it's possible.

pcm.snd-hw {
  type hw
  card 0
}

ctl.snd-hw {
  type hw
  card 0
}

pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave.pcm "snd"
}

pcm.snd {
   type softvol
   slave {
      pcm {
         type dmix
         ipc_key 1234 # any number
         slave {
            pcm "hw:0,0"
            rate 44100
            period_time 0
            period_size 1024
            buffer_size 4096
         }
      }
   }
   control {
      name "hw"
      card 0
   }
}

If anybody has any tips for improvement, they're welcome!

Hope that helps,

-- Hisham