On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 08:37 +0100, Claude Heiland-Allen wrote: 

but i don't know if it will work at all, pd only seems to scan for 
soundcards when it starts (which i think is a bug); so you'd have to 
start pd with it plugged in, then probably have to switch pd to/from the 
non-usb soundcard before/after replugging the usb

Pd seems to just ask alsa each time, so if I plug in the USB card while pd is running it appears in the audio menu.  My initial plan is to use udev to + pdsend to switch to the external card when it is plugged in and to switch back to the internal card if it's unplugged.  I don't the internal card, but it;s there so I might as well use it as the default sink.

I'll try it tonight and see.  I'm sure I will need to have a button to press that switches the audio cards in pd before I unplug the USB card .... but it would also be nice to know it would work if I'm jumping around and the usb cable falls out or something.  Not a problem on a laptop I know, but I don't play with a laptop.

The whole plan is to have the wearable/headless computer a hotpluggable pd machine.  Thus far, I have had to manually run startup scripts before a show.  I'd rather event script everything, test the hell out of it, and then be able to strap it on boot and play.  It has a Compact Flash slot which I am going to make hotpluggable for pd patch sets. 


i'm not sure if any app behaves nicely when you abruptly unplug hardware 
that it is using - there might be a way to handle it in the ALSA plugin 
layer, but the ALSA wiki doesn't look promising...

I've been using pd+jack in the past, but I think I will try alsa.  Pd does work with Alsa in Ubuntu hardy if you kill Pulseaudio.  The worst case scenerio is to have to kill pd and restart it each time, but even that would not be so bad as long as I write some sort of state setting now and then that the main control patch load on a crash. 



> .hc
> 
> On Oct 20, 2008, at 1:31 PM, Dan Wilcox wrote:
> 
>>
>> In Ubuntu ...
>>
>> When running pd with -nogui as a daemon, can I send messages to 
>> connect to and disconnect from a soundcard?  I want to be able to hot 
>> plug my usb soundcard without having to stop and start pd each time, 
>> if possible.
>>
>> ---
>> Dan Wilcox
>> robotcowboy.com
---
Dan Wilcox
robotcowboy.com