Arch Linux

KimTjik

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-08-22

Posts: 715

A very good USB DAC - and about switching between sound-devices

I just thought it could be of interest for some music lovers out there to know about a very good USB DAC. Same days ago I bought myself a Trends UD-10 USB Audio Converter. Now after some listening I must say it was an excellent buy.

Being outside of the electrical noise inside a computer case is an improvement in itself. Further on it can be powered by a battery pack, thus isolating it even better, since the USB cable then solely is used for transferring the signal. A hard drive is anyway superior to most CD-players.

Secondly I'm curious to know how others switch between sound-devices. Personally I use a C-Media PCI card as the default one, and the integrated Nvidia one for stuff like IP-telephony. Adding a USB sound-device made me looking for an option to switch over to that one as default for some serious listening (mainly using head-phones). I have a somewhat clumsy solution:

I made two files looking like this ("/usr/sound/asound_pci" for card 0=C-media PCI; "/usr/sound/asound_usb" for card 2=USB DAC):

pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
}
  ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
}

pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card 2
}
  ctl.!default {
  type hw
  card 2
}

Then I have two scripts in /bin (first named "alsa_pci" and second "alsa_usb"):

#!/bin/sh
cp /usr/sound/asound_pci /etc/asound.conf && /etc/rc.d/alsa restart

#!/bin/sh
cp /usr/sound/asound_usb /etc/asound.conf && /etc/rc.d/alsa restart

Commands "alsa_pci" and "alsa_usb" naturally only work as root, which is fine for me, but maybe not very convenient for everyone. I have tested using an ~/.asound.conf, but ALSA wouldn't pick it up in some configurations or in others not unless ALSA was restarted, which made my current solution better.

The switch works well, but maybe someone has a better solution, one that even would be possible to execute as a user.