How can I make Ubuntu compatible with baudline?

Question

When I run baudline, it displays the message "all input devices disabled" and the Input ▸ Devices screen doesn't list any devices. The baudline FAQ suggests:

Here are two possible explanations for this:

1. You don't have a properly configured audio card.
2. Or you don't have read and write privileges for /dev/audio or /dev/mixer.

The observation that sound works in every other program I've tried (though there is one exception) strongly suggests that my sound card is properly configured.

The problem appears to be related to /dev/audio and /dev/mixer. I'm certain that I do not have read and write privileges for them, because they don't even exist. I think this bug report is responsible for their absence, but I'm not sure what it means for me.

I have used baudline in Ubuntu in past years without any problems. How can I make Ubuntu's sound configuration compatible with baudline again?

Solution 1

My fix was to run it like this

parec --format=s16le --channels=1 --latency-msec=5 | ./baudline -stdin

This uses parec to read from pulseaudio and pipes it to baudline.

Solution 2

Perhaps possible three choices:

• See if the PulseAudio OSS Wrapper works with baudline e.g.

  padsp baudline -stdout > file.raw

• Install a dual boot with ArchLinux

reading through the baudline FAQ is makes it mentions working with ALSA with OSS support. I would read that as needing a kernel with OSS support. Canonical removed this support from maverick and natty. Arch still has OSS support built into their linux kernel (I think)

• compile your own kernel with the OSS flags (the flags in the bug report) with instructions such as in howtogeek

Solution 3

I loaded theese modules

• snd-pcm-oss
• snd-pcm-mixer

and added in /etc/modules

Now baudline works, can analyze and play audio

Comments

[RusGraf]

Of course! I should have thought of this.

[Simon Streicher]

For such workarounds I usually create a new executable eg. baudline_wrap to permanently wrap the old one and to symlink to eg. usr/bin/baudline. Content: #!/bin/sh newline PROGRAM_DIRECTORY="$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")" newline parec --format=s16le --channels=1 --latency-msec=5 | "$PROGRAM_DIRECTORY/baudline" -stdin "$@"