Bug#685955: libasound2-plugin-equal: alsaequal requires ~/.asoundrc to work

[Alessandro Ghedini]

tags 685955 pending
kthxbye

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 01:33:04PM +0200, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 11:40:52PM +0100, Steve wrote:
> > Package: libasound2-plugin-equal
> > Version: 0.6-4
> > Severity: important
> > 
> > 'alsamixer -D equal' gives this error:
> > ALSA lib control.c:951:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL equal
> > cannot open mixer: No such file or directory
> > 
> > This is resolved by creating a file: ~/.asoundrc
> > More details can be found from the original creators web site as to the
> > contents of this file.
> > http://www.thedigitalmachine.net/alsaequal.html
> > 
> > As a suggestion, this file could be created for every user that does not have
> > it.
> 
> A better solution would be to install the configuration file to the system-wide
> alsa-lib configuration directory (/usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d). This would also
> allow single users to enable the plugin without the need to copy-paste the whole
> configuration (see for example the pulse plugin in libasound2-plugins).

I just pushed the following fix to git:

* A simple equal.conf is installed at /usr/share/alsa-lib/alsa.conf.d:

ctl.equal {
  type equal;
}

pcm.equal {
  type equal;
}

* The example is updated to:

pcm.equalizer {
  type equal;
  # Modify the line below if you don't want to use sound card 0
  slave.pcm "plughw:0,0";
  # or if you want to use with multiple applications output to dmix
  # slave.pcm "plug:dmix"
}

# Use the equalizer as default PCM
# pcm.!default "plug:equalizer"

# Usage:
#  $ alsamixer -D equal
#  $ aplay -Dplug:equalizer foo.wav

(which is also simpler)

This makes "alsamixer -D equal" work, even if alsaequal is not configured in
the user's asoundrc/system-wide alsa.conf.

This should probably be documented in README.Debian, since it diverges from
what upstream suggests (altough upstream's way would work anyway).

Cheers

-- 
perl -E '$_=q;$/= @{[@_]};and s;\S+;<inidehG ordnasselA>;eg;say~~reverse'
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