Android "Music" App Doesn't Output Audio - But alsa_aplay Does Fine

Hi Chris,

Is your audio output device is different from OMAP3 evm?

If you are able to hear the audio when you set the controls "HeadsetR Mixer AudioR1" and "HeadsetL Mixer AudioL1",

then modify the following code in hardware/ti/omap3/modules/alsa/alsa_module.cpp (Audio HAL)

By default the code takes the route which sets "HeadsetR Mixer AudioR2" and "HeadsetR Mixer AudioL2".

Modify the first portion of the if (devices & AudioSystem::DEVICE_OUT_SPEAKER) to set the controls

"HeadsetR Mixer AudioR1" and "HeadsetL Mixer AudioL1" instead and build the file system.

void setDefaultControls(uint32_t devices, int mode)
{
LOGV("%s", __FUNCTION__);
    ALSAControl control("hw:00");

    /* check whether the devices is input or not */
    /* for output devices */
    if (devices & 0x0000FFFF){
        if (devices & AudioSystem::DEVICE_OUT_SPEAKER) {
            control.set("HeadsetR Mixer AudioR2", 1); // on
            control.set("HeadsetL Mixer AudioL2", 1); // on
            control.set("Headset Playback Volume", 1); //Headset Volume
        } else {
            control.set("HeadsetR Mixer AudioR1", (unsigned int)0); // off
            control.set("HeadsetL Mixer AudioL1", (unsigned int)0); // off
        }
    }

Please let us know if you face any further difficulties.

Regards,

Arun

Kindly click the verify answer button on this post if it answer your question.

Thanks, Arun, for your reply, but I'm confused.  The GingerBread_2_3_4_DevKit_2_1 release code that I have was already using "HeadsetR Mixer AudioR1" and "HeadsetL Mixer AudioL1", not the R2 and L2 versions you said it should have been using.  Do I have the wrong release?

As a test, I ran alsa_aplay after turning off the L1 & R1 mixer switches and turning on the L2 & R2 mixer switches using alsa_amixer and the audio played back just fine.  So I'm not sure why both L1/R1 and L2/R2 exist.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Chris

Chris,

I have cloned android sources from gitorious.org/rowboat with rowboat-gingerbread.xml which is the latest development manifest.

You are using GingerBread_2_3_4_DevKit_2_1 release manifest.

In the latest code, we have made these changes to add support for a different board based on omap3evm and TPS6595x.

L2 & R2 paths will work for all the boards.

So it seems, you are able with alsa_aplay but not with Music application with the current settings on Android (L1-R1 path or L2-R2 path).

Could you please post your logcat output?

Which is the platform you are evaluating the release? Is it a custom board?

Regards,

Arun

Thanks for your quick reply, Arun.

> Could you please post your logcat output?

2061.logcat.txt

(note that this is both the boot log and the output of logcat)

> Which is the platform you are evaluating the release? Is it a custom board?

Yes, but there is nothing unique about the audio path--it's very much like the omap3evm.

- Chris

I should add that we don't have Bluetooth on the board, so no bluetooth audio hardware.  Also,

alsa_aplay -L

yields

default:CARD=omap3us
    omap3us,
    Default Audio Device
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

and

alsa_aplay -l

yields

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: omap3us [omap3us], device 0: TWL4030 twl4030-hifi-0 []
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: omap3us [omap3us], device 1: WL1271BT wl1271bt-1 []
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

So although we don't have any bluetooth hardware on the board, the software hooks are there.

- Chris

Chris,

The logcat shows no issues with the audio playback and Music App works fine. So it seems Audio Volume is not sufficient.

Can you set the Volume Component to Maximum from the setDefaultControls function?

See what is the value of the "Volume" with amixer, when you are able to hear the audio with alsa_aplay.

Regards,

Arun

If you are referring to the "Headset Playback Volume" volume, then the preferred volume is 2 when I use amixer.  I have set it to 3, but that's too loud.  The default of 1 that is in the alsa_module.cpp file is definitely audible, but not quite loud enough.

Is that the volume you were referring to, or is there some other--since that's already getting set?

Thanks,

Chris

I still haven't figured this out, but here are some possible issues that I can think of:

1. It's not opening the correct device (don't see any problem in the logcat output, but I don't know if there would be any).
2. Although I'm playing a 44.1kHz stereo WAV file, perhaps the Music app isn't handling it correctly, and thus I'm not hearing anything
   1. I tried also playing an MP3 file, which seems to play just fine, but again, no audio output.
3. If it were just an alsa_amixer setting problem, then shouldn't I be able to hear if the setting was right for alsa_aplay to be heard?

Just FYI, I'm running on a system that...

1. Has an Ethernet port and the root filesystem is NFS mounted over Ethernet.
2. I'm entering the alsa_amixer and alsa_aplay commands over the debug UART (/dev/ttyO0)

Thanks again for your assistance,

Chris

Hi Chris,

In your logcat, I find these lines

E/AudioHardwareALSA( 1082): ALSA Module not found!!!
W/AudioHardwareInterface( 1082): Using stubbed audio hardware. No sound will be produced.

This means, either 

1)
You have
BOARD_USES_GENERIC_AUDIO set to true
and commented 
BOARD_USES_ALSA_AUDIO, BOARD_USES_ALSA_UTILS.

Even if you 
BOARD_USES_ALSA_AUDIO, BOARD_USES_ALSA_UTILS
set to true, you have to perform a clean build, [ie
make TARGET_PRODUCT=<> clean then build] to get the alsa audio back.

2) You dont have alsa.<platform>.so present in the filesystem.

Most likely 1) would be the issue.

Check whether you have 
BOARD_USES_ALSA_AUDIO, BOARD_USES_ALSA_UTILS set to true and
BOARD_USES_GENERIC_AUDIO is commented.
Clean build is required in case of this change.

Regards,
Arun

Thanks Arun.  This tack look very promising.  I already do have this in the BoardConfig.mk file:

#BOARD_USES_GENERIC_AUDIO := true
BOARD_USES_ALSA_AUDIO := true
BUILD_WITH_ALSA_UTILS := true

And I can confirm that the the alsa.omap3suA.so file is in the root filesystem at /system/lib/hw/.  I have also done some "clean" builds to make sure things were built correctly, so I"m not sure why the .so file isn't getting loaded properly.

Since I adapted my configuration from the omap3evm's, looking in device/ti/omap3evm/ I see that the text "omap3evm" is used in several places:

BoardConfig.mk:   TARGET_BOOTLOADER_BOARD_NAME := omap3evm
omap3evm.mk:      PRODUCT_NAME := omap3evm
omap3evm.mk:      PRODUCT_DEVICE := omap3evm

In addition it is specified as TARGET_PRODUCT when doing the build for the EVM.  For alsa on the target, it probably shows up as alsa.omap3evm.so, as well as the default device in the kernel build.  Is the library to load selected from TARGET_PRODUCT or TARGET_BOOTLOADER_BOARD_NAME or PRODUCT_NAME or PRODUCT_DEVICE or something else?

Thanks again,

Chris

Chris,

I think you can have a check by copying alsa.omap3suA.so to alsa.omap3evm.so or alsa.default.so and having it in the rootfs.

I guess the library to be loaded is decided by alsa.<TARGET_PRODUCT>.so

Arun, we're there!!!  The audio is working.

It seemed to load when named

alsa.default.so

or

alsa.omap3evm.so

but not

alsa.omap3suA.so

After checking a little further, I found that on the target, system/build.prop still had ro.product.board=omap3evm.  Changing it to omap3suA allowed it to load alsa.omap3suA.so.

It turns out that ro.product.board comes from TARGET_BOOTLOADER_BOARD_NAME in BoardConfig.mk.  I didn't get that switched over to omap3suA because I thought it applied only to u-boot.

Thanks for your help,

Chris

Thanks Chris and Arun, for your conversations, 

I am also faced same problem in audio and got working.

Thanks & Regards,

santosh vastrad