audacity crashes recording

[Russell L. Carter]

On 07/09/14 17:48, Russell L. Carter wrote:
> 
> 
> On 07/09/14 17:11, Hans Petter Selasky wrote:
>> On 07/10/14 01:52, Russell L. Carter wrote:
> 
>>> Anybody got audacity working with OSS?  Possibly with
>>> snd_uaudio?
>>>
>>
>> Yes, it works, but you need to compile it with possibly another audio
>> backend.
> 

I got a reply off-list of "My Audacity is using portaudio, and that
seems to work."

So I did some digging, and for the benefit of others who do not
already know the last 20 years of sound subsystems history, here is
what I have found so far (probably some mistakes; I'd appreciate
corrections).

First, there are two different OSS implementations:

1. audio/oss: opensound.com OSS, currently at version 4.2.  I got OSS
   v4.2 loaded but it doesn't see my USB sound device.

2. Native FreeBSD OSS, which is apparently a complete rewrite of
   opensound.com OSS v3, documented in
   http://www.opensound.com/pguide/oss.pdf.  In what follows, I'm
   going to label native FreeBSD OSS "OSS-FreeBSD".

   My USB device is
   uaudio0: <Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio CODEC, class 0/0, rev
1.10/1.00, addr 9>
   Sound output works great on OSS-FreeBSD.

   # cat /dev/sndstat
   Installed devices:
   pcm0: <USB audio> (play/rec) default

There are two portaudio ports:

1. audio/portaudio, which is actually portaudio 1.8, and apparently has
   support for OSS-FreeBSD.  It has no support for alsa.

2. audio/portaudio2 which is actually portaudio 1.9, and apparently has
   no support for OSS-FreeBSD.  It does have robust support for alsa.

Now audio/audacity also includes portaudio 1.9, which is always
enabled.  So, first tip, don't bother with installing either of the
audio/portaudio ports to support audacity.

So apparently I need to get alsa working.  Alsa has a plugin,
installed by audio/alsa-plugins: libasound_module_pcm_oss.so.  This
enables alsa to talk to OSS-FreeBSD.  (I am guessing)

So audacity is going to talk to our sound devices by traversing the
following compatibility layers:

audacity <-> portaudio-1.9 <-> alsa <-> OSS-FreeBSD <-> sound device

Seems suboptimal, but heh.  If it works, great!

However, audacity doesn't see my recording device, and indeed

# arecord -l
arecord: device_list:279: no soundcards found...

# arecord -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

My /usr/local/etc/asound.conf is copied from the distribution version
of asound.conf.sample installed by audio/alsa-lib.  I haven't got google
to cough up any examples of modifying it, though it's not clear that
it's the problem.  My sound device is /dev/dsp0.0.

Any ideas on how to get alsa to recognize the rec device?

Thanks,
Russell