OK, no luck so far, even with the wiki instructions.
I am running an MSI RX480 Neo2-F Socket 939 Motherboard motherboard with the ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02).
My "aplay -L" shows this:
cards 'cards.pcm'
front 'cards.pcm.front'
rear 'cards.pcm.rear'
center_lfe 'cards.pcm.center_lfe'
side 'cards.pcm.side'
surround40 'cards.pcm.surround40'
surround41 'cards.pcm.surround41'
surround50 'cards.pcm.surround50'
surround51 'cards.pcm.surround51'
surround71 'cards.pcm.surround71'
iec958 'cards.pcm.iec958'
spdif 'cards.pcm.iec958'
modem 'cards.pcm.modem'
phoneline 'cards.pcm.phoneline'
default 'cards.pcm.default'
dmix 'cards.pcm.dmix'
dsnoop 'cards.pcm.dsnoop'
Which tells me that yes, the hardware is seen and recognized.
So I unmuted the IEC958, per the wiki. Since my spdif entry above is just a pointer to the iec958 interface I should be able to send a sound to ALSA:spdif and get something right? No.
Running "aplay -D ALSA:spdif ac3_48khz_diatonis_soal.ac3" gets me this error:
ALSA lib pcm.c:2143:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM ALSA:spdif
aplay: main:547: audio open error: No such file or directory
So I tried "aplay -D ALSA:iec958 ac3_48khz_diatonis_soal.ac3" and got the same.
I also tried "speaker-test -Dspdif -c6" (and the same with iec958 instead of spdif) and I get:
speaker-test 1.0.11rc2
Playback device is spdif
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 6 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1105:(snd_func_refer) Unable to find definition 'cards.ATIIXP.pcm.iec958.1:CARD=0,AES0=4,AES1=130,AES2=0,AES3=2'
ALSA lib conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:3968:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2143:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM spdif
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory
All of this says to me - it can't find the spdif out, despite it showing up in aplay -L.
Can anyone advise?
Thanks in advance.