Unsound Sound

["Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net>]

This seems to be a case of not knowing what I don't know. There
is a wheezy system that is routinely updated and sound mostly
works normally with /dev/dsp being a CS4237B built-in sound card
and /dev/dsp1 is a usb-based sound card that works just like it
should.

	I did need to add
snd_cs4236 and snd_usb_audio to /etc/modules to insure that the
cs4237B is always /dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1 is always the usb sound
card but here is the issue:

	If I call mplayer which wants /dev/dsp to be Card 0, it
usually plays the file but not always. On some types of .wav
files, /dev/dsp refuses to play the file and claims that /dev/dsp
is busy even though lsof doesn't show /dev/dsp as being open.
Other types of .wav file play perfectly.

	I recently used text2wav which is part of the festival
speech synthesizer suite and it produced a .wav file called u.wav
which was made of 16-bit littleendian samples that should just
play. The mplayer application complained as follows:

[AO_ALSA] Unable to set samplerate-2: Invalid argument
Failed to initialize audio driver 'alsa'
[AO OSS] audio_setup: Can't open audio device /dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
Failed to initialize audio driver 'oss'
Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound.

If I used aplay, the message reads:

Playing WAVE 'u.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 16000 Hz, Mono

	That same u.wav file played perfectly if I used
/dev/dsp1.

	I also get many .wav or .mp3 files to play through
/dev/dsp so the inability to play some wav files is related to
their content or header format.

	I actually posted a message last week in which I thought
the problem had to do with a program I was writing whose output
was a .wav stream but now I realize that it was the problem I
have been mentioning in this post.

	Any ideas as to why all files play through Card 1
but some .wav files refuse to play through Card 0? It's usually
all or nothing.

	Thank you for all relevant suggestions.

Martin McCormick