status of Snd soundfile-editor in squeeze???

[Jim McCloskey]

I've used the Snd soundfile editor for many years for simple audio editing tasks.
But since upgrading to current testing I don't seem to be able to anymore.

After installation of the basic infrastructure (the snd package itself) you need
to install one of the user interface packages---snd-gtk-jack, snd-gtk-pulse, or
snd-gtk. The first builds in Jack support, the second builds in pulse-audio
support, and the third (which I have always used) should just interface directly
with Alsa.

The upgrade process was quite fraught, because on startup, snd complained about
missing extension files and faulty load-paths. I got past those problems by
removing a .snd_guile_prefs file in my home directory left there by the previous
version of the package.

A worse problem, though, is that any attempt to play a file or a selected region
of a file results in:

  can't play: open read /dev/dsp: No such file or directory 
              [audio.c[1825] linux_audio_open_with_error]

The snd-pcm-oss module is loaded and the oss-compat package is installed and no
other audio utility or player gives such a message (which seems to reflect a very
old version of Alsa).

I notice that the version of snd-gtk available in the repositories is very old
(7.18-2.2 0 from lenny, with no version at all in squeeze or sid)

It's also strange that invocation of snd results in repeated versions of this
warning message:

  snd &
  17791
  jack_client_new: deprecated
  Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
  Cannot connect to server socket
  jack server is not running or cannot be started

even though I am not running (and do not want to run) jackd or the jack-enabled
version of snd-gtk.

There is no documentation that I can find in /usr/share/doc/ that talks about any
of these issues, but the best sense I can make of it is that at this point you
can't use snd unless you're willing to engage with the complexities and difficulties 
of jackd and pulseaudio.

Which is a real pity since before the upgrade all worked smoothly and well. And
if this is the case, surely it should be documented somewhere?

Is there anyone who understands what's going on here or who has advice to offer?

Jim McCloskey