Getting CMedia USB Sound to Work with MPD on the Raspberry Pi

This assumes that you have a working installation of mpd and mpc and you can get sound out of the analog port. Using 2012-09-18_wheezy.img, the analog sound still has loud pops when you change streaming stations in mpd, plus noticeable hiss in the background of quiet passages.

To get the CMedia USB Sound dongle (looks like this one available at Newegg) working, you need to install alsamixer (if not already installed) via the command:

sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

Once that is installed, you need to modify the appropriate section of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf so it looks like this:

# Keep snd-usb-audio from beeing loaded as first soundcard
#options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-audio index=0

Setting the index to 0 allows the USB Sound dongle to be loaded first. Index=-2 prevents that.

Then, in /etc/mpd.conf, you want to change the sound section like this:

# An example of an ALSA output:
#
audio_output {
    type           "alsa"
    name         "My ALSA Device"
    device        "hw:0,0"    # optional
    format         "44100:16:2"    # optional
#  mixer_device    "default"    # optional
    mixer_control    "Speaker"    # added 2012-10-04 for USB Sound dongle
    mixer_index    "0"        # optional
}

"Speaker" is how alsa-mixer refers to the device (alsamixer partial screen show below):

 Card: C-Media USB Audio Device                       F1:  Help               │
 Chip: USB Mixer                                      F2:  System information │
 View: F3:[Playback] F4: Capture  F5: All             F6:  Select sound card  │
 Item: Speaker [dB gain: -26.69, -26.69]              Esc: Exit     

         
If you have problems, examine the output of mpd from /var/log/mpd/mpd.log by tail. When I was troubleshooting this, the log was helpful. Here are some sample messages which pointed me in the right direction:

Oct 14 19:46 : avahi: Service 'Music Player' successfully established.
Oct 14 19:46 : mixer: Failed to read mixer for 'My ALSA Device': no such mixer control: PCM

I tried using PCM because that is associated with the first installed sound card. Making the changes shown for alsa-base.conf to allow the USB Sound card to start first changes the alsamixer output to Item: Speaker from Item:PCM