Bug#578720: vorbis-tools: Sends invalid argument to ALSA when playing some files

[Martin Steghöfer]

severity 578720 minor
thanks


Martin Steghöfer wrote:
> The error message here is a bit cryptic. What it tries to say is: Your 
> output device doesn't support Mono playback and no software in the 
> output pipeline [...] is willing to do the necessary upmixing [...] 
> Doing the upmixing in ogg123 is certainly out of its scope and libao 
> also seems too simple. [...]

Hmmm, however, what could be done about this issue is to improve the 
error message, so it tells the user that the mode isn't supported by the 
user's hardware, instead of talking about an "invalid argument". 
Unfortunately, this message isn't produced by ogg123. The string 
"invalid argument" comes from ALSA ("snd_strerror") and it's printed by 
libao (in "ao_plugin_open"). So either of them could improve the wording.

What do the libao maintainers (Ron and John in CC) think about this? 
Should I reassign this to the libao package?

Cheers,
Martin