ALSA equivalent to /dev/audio dump? - c

Question

This will be my poorest question ever...
On an old netbook, I installed an even older version of Debian, and toyed around a bit. One of the rather pleasing results was a very basic MP3 player (using libmpg123), integrated for adding background music to a little application doing something completely different. I grew rather fond of this little solution.
In that program, I dumped the decoded audio (from mpg123_decode()) to /dev/audio via a simple fwrite().
This worked fine - on the netbook.
Now, I came to understand that /dev/audio was something done by OSS, and is no longer supported on newer (ALSA) machines. Sure enough, my laptop (running a current Linux Mint) does not have this device.
So apparently I have to use ALSA instead. Searching the web, I've found a couple of tutorials, and they pretty much blow my mind. Modes, parameters, capabilities, access type, sample format, sample rate, number of channels, number of periods, period size... I understand that ALSA is a powerful API for the ambitious, but that's not what I am looking for (or have the time to grok). All I am looking for is how to play the output of mpg123_decode (the format of which I don't even know, not being an audio geek by a long shot).
Can anybody give me some hints on what needs to be done?
tl;dr
How do I get ALSA to play raw audio data?

Answer 1

There's an OSS compatibility layer for ALSA in the alsa-oss package. Install it and run your program inside the "aoss" program. Or, modprobe the modules listed here:
http://wiki.debian.org/SoundFAQ/#line-105
Then, you'll need to change your program to use "/dev/dsp" or "/dev/dsp0" instead of "/dev/audio". It should work how you remembered... but you might want to cross your fingers just in case.

Answer 2

You could install sox and open a pipe to the play command with the correct samplerate and sample size arguments.

Answer 3

Using ALSA directly is overly complicated, so I hope a Gstreamer solution is fine to you too. Gstreamer gives a nice abstraction to ALSA/OSS/Pulseaudio/you name it -- and is ubiquitous in the Linux world.
I wrote a little library that will open a FILE object where you can fwrite PCM data into:
Gstreamer file. The actual code is less than 100 lines.
Use use it like that:
FILE *output = fopen_gst(rate, channels, bit_depth); // open audio output file
while (have_more_data) fwrite(data, amount, 1, output); // output audio data
fclose(output); // close the output file
I added an mpg123 example, too.
Here is the whole file (in case Github get's out of business ;-) ):
/**
* gstreamer_file.c
* Copyright 2012 René Kijewski <rene.SURNAME#fu-berlin.de>
* License: LGPL 3.0 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0)
*/
#include "gstreamer_file.h"
#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <glib.h>
#include <gst/gst.h>
#ifndef _GNU_SOURCE
# error "You need to add -D_GNU_SOURCE to the GCC parameters!"
#endif
/**
* Cookie passed to the callbacks.
*/
typedef struct {
/** { file descriptor to read from, fd to write to } */
int pipefd[2];
/** Gstreamer pipeline */
GstElement *pipeline;
} cookie_t;
static ssize_t write_gst(void *cookie_, const char *buf, size_t size) {
cookie_t *cookie = cookie_;
return write(cookie->pipefd[1], buf, size);
}
static int close_gst(void *cookie_) {
cookie_t *cookie = cookie_;
gst_element_set_state(cookie->pipeline, GST_STATE_NULL); /* we are finished */
gst_object_unref(GST_OBJECT(cookie->pipeline)); /* we won't access the pipeline anymore */
close(cookie->pipefd[0]); /* we won't write anymore */
close(cookie->pipefd[1]); /* we won't read anymore */
free(cookie); /* dispose the cookie */
return 0;
}
FILE *fopen_gst(long rate, int channels, int depth) {
/* initialize Gstreamer */
if (!gst_is_initialized()) {
GError *error;
if (!gst_init_check(NULL, NULL, &error)) {
g_error_free(error);
return NULL;
}
}
/* get a cookie */
cookie_t *cookie = malloc(sizeof(*cookie));
if (!cookie) {
return NULL;
}
/* open a pipe to be used between the caller and the Gstreamer pipeline */
if (pipe(cookie->pipefd) != 0) {
close(cookie->pipefd[0]);
close(cookie->pipefd[1]);
free(cookie);
return NULL;
}
/* set up the pipeline */
char description[256];
snprintf(description, sizeof(description),
"fdsrc fd=%d ! " /* read from a file descriptor */
"audio/x-raw-int, rate=%ld, channels=%d, " /* get PCM data */
"endianness=1234, width=%d, depth=%d, signed=true ! "
"audioconvert ! audioresample ! " /* convert/resample if needed */
"autoaudiosink", /* output to speakers (using ALSA, OSS, Pulseaudio ...) */
cookie->pipefd[0], rate, channels, depth, depth);
cookie->pipeline = gst_parse_launch_full(description, NULL,
GST_PARSE_FLAG_FATAL_ERRORS, NULL);
if (!cookie->pipeline) {
close(cookie->pipefd[0]);
close(cookie->pipefd[1]);
free(cookie);
return NULL;
}
/* open a FILE with specialized write and close functions */
cookie_io_functions_t io_funcs = { NULL, write_gst, NULL, close_gst };
FILE *result = fopencookie(cookie, "w", io_funcs);
if (!result) {
close_gst(cookie);
return NULL;
}
/* start the pipeline (of cause it will wait for some data first) */
gst_element_set_state(cookie->pipeline, GST_STATE_PLAYING);
return result;
}

Answer 4

And ten years later, the "actual" answer is found: That's the wrong way to do it in the first place.
libmpg123 comes with a companion library, libout123, which abstracts the underlying audio system for you. Based on libmpg123 example code:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include "mpg123.h"
#include "out123.h"
int main()
{
mpg123_handle * _mpg_handle;
out123_handle * _out_handle;
double rate, channels, encoding;
size_t position, buffer_size;
unsigned char * buffer;
char filename[] = "Example.mp3";
mpg123_open( _mpg_handle, filename );
mpg123_getformat( _mpg_handle, &rate, &channels, &encoding );
out123_open( _out_handle, NULL, NULL );
mpg123_format_none( _mpg_handle );
mpg123_format( _mpg_handle, rate, channels, encoding );
out123_start( _out_handle, rate, channels, encoding );
buffer_size = mpg123_outblock( _mpg_handle );
buffer = malloc( buffer_size );
do
{
mpg123_read( _mpg_handle, buffer.get(), buffer_size, &position );
out123_play( _out_handle, buffer.get(), position );
} while ( position );
out123_close( _out_handle );
mpg123_close( _mpg_handle );
free( buffer );
}