On 27 September 2011 09:18, Alexander Sack <asac@linaro.org> wrote:
Hi,

we are looking at landing more and more full stack test cases for our automated board support status tracking efforts.

While for some hardware ports it's hard to test whether a port really gets a proper signal etc, we feel for audio this might be
relatively straight forward: we got the idea that we could connect a cable from jack out to jack in in the lab and then have
a testcase that plays something using aplay and checks that he gets proper input/signal on the jack in.

This could be done on alsa level and later pa level (for ubuntu).

A more advanced idea that came up when discussing options was to use opensource speech recognition like sphinx to even
go one step further and see if the output we produce yields roughly the same input. For that we could play one or two words,
use speech recognition to parse it and check if the resulting text is stable/expected.

What do you think?

These are really good ideas. I had started a discussion with Torez several months ago about an automated test for audio.  My idea at the time was to use a sine wav at a particular frequency and use or hack one of the tuner/freq analysis apps to detect the frequency. If it was too garbled or distorted, it wouldnt recognize the frequency.

As you know, sound quality is very subjective and depends on the cables, speakers, amp, etc.  I like the speech recognition idea as well, for the same reasons. It might actually be a better test of the quality.



Would MMWG be able to take experimenting and implementing such end-to-end audio test into their 11.10 work list?

I think this is a really good idea to explore. Could we also maybe use camera and face recognition when we hack a pandaboard to do that? Hm...

I'll see if I can get a rough size for this. If not for 11.10, then we should definitely document a card for the next quarter and see what the TSC thinks.
 


Thanks for your support!

--
Alexander Sack
Technical Director, Linaro Platform Teams
http://www.linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs
http://twitter.com/#!/linaroorg - http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog





--

Kurt Taylor (irc krtaylor)
Linaro Multimedia Team Lead
Linaro.org 
│ Open source software for ARM SoCs
Follow Linaro: 
Facebook | Twitter | Blog