USB Audio On CentOS-7

Home » CentOS » USB Audio On CentOS-7
CentOS 6 Comments

I’m using CentOS-7 on my PC, with ASUS motherboard. internal audio has always worked fine EXCEPT that I can never get audio input (for recording) to work. I want to feed audio from a phono turntable and from a cassette deck. I use a phono preamp for the turntable, or directly connect the tape deck.

but either nothing, or low level with horrible distortion.

so, I gave up (after years of intermittent battles) and bought a Behringer UFO202, which looks like it should work fine with Linux. It allegedly uses a TI PCM2902 chipset, which many online postings claim works fine with various flavors of Linux. This device has a USB port, a pair of line in and line out jacks, a phono jack, a headphone volume control, and a switch to change the line in to phono in.

I can use headphones plugged into the UFO202 to listen to audio playing on the computer, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to feed audio into the UFO202 (via its line in RCA jacks) and have it come out speakers or phones connected to the computer.

I’ve poked and proded at alsamixer, the mate sound tool, and pavucontrol. No useful results.

Pavucontrol, in its input section, does show the device listed, and it shows activity on its level mater when there is audio input via the line in jacks on the UFO202. Disconnect the line input and the activity ceases.

(Mate sound control also lists the device, but I don’t even get an indication of any input at all, as I described above for pavucontrol.)

but I simply cannot figure out how to get that audio to play in any audible way.

I know that USB audio input works, because I have a Plantronics USB
headset with microphone that I use often to converse online, and it works nicely.

(and a possibly separate issue: how the heck does one point Audacity to a USB input? Can’t find anything in its UI, and there’s darn little help online that is actually helpful, in this regard.)

Can you sense my frustration here?

I’d appreciate any help that is actually helpful,… perhaps someone who reads this actually has one of these things and has made it work?

thanks in advance!

Fred

6 thoughts on - USB Audio On CentOS-7

  • Not sure about the other stuff but my USB dock’s mic input shows up in Audacity on Fedora 26 under the second drop down on the last row (next to the little microphone icon).

    In the passed I’ve had most luck with pavucontrol, since it was the only one I could find that would allow me to turn on monitoring.

  • thanks, that probably is a good place to start. some of that may be pretty old, but I’m checking it out. One could wish it wasn’t quite so terse, in spots.

    Fred

  • Yes, I sense your frustration; I’ve had my fair share of it with bluetooth devices and I found a site *[0]* that helped me write a script to take control of my audio woes.

  • OK, I spent several hours messing with it, including trying the things shown at the audacity URL above. But at that point, it was as if there was no input device there. gave up, went to bed.

    next day I noticed that no audio played at all even without the USB device, not from a DVD, nor a MP3 file, nor from any web video. so I figured some bit of hardware had gotten into some
    “I’m gonna play dead” state, so I did a full power off and reboot, after which I had normal audio again.

    so I plugged in the USB device again and fed some audio into its line in. fired up Audacity and was able to select the USB device as its input, and it records!

    the recording, when played back, is kinda jumpy, as if bits of it got lost on record, but otherwise doesn’t sound too bad. Wondering if I need to try a realtime kernel… (or maybe I
    should just pause the Folding At Home client while recording… there’s a thing to try! :)

    thanks for the hint!

    Fred

  • Below is an email from last year, and this is a followup or at least related, so I’m including it below for your reference.

    Using this USB “sound card” (it’s not a card…) I can (as related below) record input from a tape deckwith Audacity.

    But what I haven’t figured out how to do, though there must be some incantation that works, is to simply play audio input coming in via the USB device, through the speakers. Between Alsa and Pulse, I have tried every option I can imagine that should make it work, but no go.

    Anybody know what settings should be used for sending audio coming into the system via a USB audio device, to the speakers?

    thanks in advance!

    Fred