GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 340246
ALSA audio failure with Intel 82801DB-ICH4 "cannot set channel count"
Last modified: 2007-01-02 18:40:13 UTC
Attempting to use current release of ekiga on Ubuntu Breezy, with an Intel 82801DB-ICH4 audio device. Hitting 'Test Audio' just spits out Cannot set channel count Invalid argument and fails. I can't find any other debugging. Under OSS, capture doesn't work at all, either.
Please report the bug to the ALSA people.
Um, what? Why is this an ALSA bug? I have a lot of other programs (including a number of softphones) and ekiga is the only one that has this problem. Saying "it's an ALSA bug" is not helpful. The problem is that the device can't be opened in mono mode. From my work on shtoom, there's a lot of linux audio devices with this behaviour, and it's not that hard to work around - open in stereo, mix down to mono. beaker% arecord -c 2 -f S16_LE > /dev/null Recording WAVE 'stdout' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 8000 Hz, Stereo Aborted by signal Interrupt... beaker% arecord -c 1 -f S16_LE > /dev/null Recording WAVE 'stdout' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono arecord: set_params:887: Channels count non available This is not an ALSA bug. This is something that ekiga should support.
Sorry, but it is an ALSA bug. Ekiga is using the plughw device. If you don't know about it, that special device is supposed to convert everything that is needed to support the parameters that you are passing as arguments. That means that : arecord -c 1 -f S16_LE -D plughw:0 > /dev/null should always work. If it doesn't, then your ALSA is broken.
Check this page about the 'plug' plugin: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html#pcm_plugins_plug From the page: "This plugin converts channels, rate and format on request."
Marking as INVALID too.