[Voyage-linux] QB9 and some earlier silly questions of mine

[jegunn]

I tried just setting the music directory in mpd.conf to the local disk
first, but never got it to work. It was almost certainly a fluke
that it finally worked with a symlink in /var/lib/mpd, but the
question of why it is flaky remains.

Some more info on the sequencing: On the C7 machine, the results are not 
consistent. There seems no way to be sure it will work; usually 
(re-)booting with both the computer and the QB9 powered up and connected 
works, but not always. Interestingly, it seems to be most reliable when 
one shuts down with something playing, so as soon as the state file is 
read on startup, playback resumes. Plugging in the USB from the QB9 with 
it powered sometimes works. Clearly some weird timing problem. It may be 
interesting that the failure mode is different on the two machines; on the 
C7, I do not get ANY error message when I plug in the powered-up QB9, the 
dashes appear on the screen, but nothing will play. Thought it might have 
something to do with the timing of loading/registering snd-usb-audio, but 
does not help to load it before connecting.

My QB9 is brand-new, and I gather from other posts that, in agreement with
Nick, the early models with the USB2 interface just worked; there must
have been some change.

NOT very satisfactory.

--jim gunn

On Wed, 4 May 2011, Nick L. wrote:

> On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 12:06 PM, jegunn <jeg at astro.princeton.edu> wrote:
>
>> Most importantly, I discovered that whether the QB9 works or not with its
>> USB2.0 setting is very dependent on sequencing. For me, on two machines
>> running voyage, if you power up the QB9 with the USB connected, it does NOT
>> work; one gets the ubiquitous
>>
>> ALSA clock.c:227: 4:1:1: cannot get frequency at ep 0x1
>>
>> and the display immediately comes up "96", and it will not play
>> anything.
>>
>> If, on the other hand, you plug in the USB with voyage running and
>> the QB9 powered and running, it works fine. I will keep you posted
>> on further developments.
>
> I don't have that issue with my qb-9. It was purchased summer of 2010
> and was one of the first units that contained the new 24/192 UAC2
> board. Any combination of powering/connecting has worked just fine
> with any version of Voyage Linux or Voyage MPD. Normally, the qb-9 is
> in standby mode and the Alix gets turned on from a switch. Not once
> did I have to unplug/plug it in for it to initialize; truly flawless
> from day one.
>
>
>> One of the machines, a mini-itx with
>> a Zotac M880G motherboard, is running 7.0; the other, an old
>> VIA C7 mini-itx, is running the slightly more recent current version
>> I downloaded a couple of days ago; I do not think there are significant
>> changes from 7.0, but Punky could comment.
>>
>> I have had nutty troubles with mpd building the database from scratch;
>> the music on both machines is on a local disk, and I just make a symlink
>> called music in /var/lib/mpd to a directory which contains symlinks to
>> the real music directories, organized one directory per album, roughly.
>> It always takes several restarts and various combinations of deleting
>> tag_cache, etc, before the database finally magically appears, and I
>> have no real idea of what I did which finally made it happen. I wish
>> to hell that mpd --create-db had not gone away; it always seemed to work.
>
> Why not just edit mpd.conf and point to the directories on the local disk?
>
> Nick
>