ALSA outputs only mono

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

Hello,

I own a Vero 4k+ and would like to run Music Player Daemon (mpd) for music playback.

Both Kodi and mpd use the HDMI output. They do not play simultaneously, of course.

mpd used ALSA for playback. However, I only get 1-channel output.

speaker-test -c 2 -D hw:0,0 -t wav

outputs says “Front Right” on one speaker and does not say “Front Left” on the other speaker.

speaker-test -c 6 -D hw:0,0 -t wav

does not run at all (6 channels not supported).

Kodi has no problems with 2, nor with 6-channel output (Audio-Test files play nicely) and does not output only mono?! Any help is appreciated!

Best regards,

Henning

2

Well it ‘works for me’.

osmc@vero4kp2:~$ speaker-test -c2 -t wav

speaker-test 1.2.4

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 2 channels
WAV file(s)
Rate set to 48000Hz (requested 48000Hz)
Buffer size range from 32 to 131072
Period size range from 16 to 16384
Using max buffer size 131072
Periods = 4
was set period_size = 16384
was set buffer_size = 131072
 0 - Front Left
 1 - Front Right
Time per period = 0.377738
 0 - Front Left
 1 - Front Right
Time per period = 3.067283
 0 - Front Left
 1 - Front Right

The first ‘Front Left’ is not complete but from then on it’s fine.

Vero’s chip supports only 2 or 8 channels. In Kodi we send 8 channels but mask the unused channels when playing 4 or 6 channels. Odd numbers of channels can be problematic. If playing directly through ALSA you may need some custom .conf files for channel counts other than 2 or 8.

I had a look at mpd and wondered why you want to use it. One of the joys of Kodi is I can run it on every device I have in the house from the same media server and with the same user interface. Is there some special thing mpd can do that we could add to OSMC?