Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide

[rgmussel]

Unfortunately, I am having the same problem in Dapper. I hope someone posts a solution to this problem soon, and I'm hoping that if more people clammer about it, developers will take more interest.

Ross

[pinballkid]

I've being trying to get my intel-hda soundcard on my laptop working for quite some time now and I thought I'd try something different.

I bought myself a cheap little usb sound card (the kind where you plug your headphones into the back) and I'd like to see if I can get sound out of it.

I've been through the guide, and have just finished compiling and installing the alsa drivers from source. The card doesn't show up when I do aplay -l.

lsusb has this to say about the card:

aBus 001 Device 002: ID 0d8c:000c C-Media Electronics, Inc. Audio Adapters a sound card

Checking the alsa-project page, I saw that the only two drivers associated with CMedia were cmi8330 and cmipci

I configured the alsa source with the cmi8330 card, and installed, but when I try to modprobe it I get:

FATAL: Error inserting snd_cmi8330 (/lib/modules/2.6.15-26-386/updates/alsa/isa/snd-cmi8330.ko): No such device

It seems like the device isnt being found, possibly because it is a usb device.

Any suggestions?

[jjlido]

Hi,

I tried all the steps mentioned abobe but I still have no sound

if I type aplay -l i get
aplay: device_list:221: nessuna scheda audio trovata.
(italian message forn no audiocard found)

but I can see it in lspci:
0000:00:1b.0 0403: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02).

anybody can help me?

many thanks in advance

[camorri]

Thank-you for your effort in creating this very useful tutorial. With it I have been able to get sound out of my old Compaq Presario 1245 laptop. The sound card is an ESS1869 ( ISA ) card. Form the hardware documentation on Compaq ( HP ) site, I found out the card uses irq 5, dma 0 or dma1 and port 0x220.

From the ALSA site I found the card is supported with the snd-es18xx driver. In order to get things going, I edited /etc/modules and added a line at the bottom 'snd-es18xx' ( no quotes ). I created a file called /etc/modprobe.d/sound and addeda line,

options snd-es18xx isapnp=0 port=0x220 irq=5 dma1=1

and then I ran the command 'update-modules' and booted the system On re-boot the tom toms played.

The only suggestion I have for the document is to create a section for legacy ISA cards. If the one example were not there, I wouldn't have had a clew on how to get it going. BTW, this is on a new install of xubuntu 6.06. Sound worked on breezy but not until I did the above on 6.06.

Once again, thank-you for your effort.

[Techman010]

It finally works everytime I boot( not just some of the time). Nice Guide.

Thanks.

[escape]

I had sound working with all defaults (esd?) but I wanted to get an equalizer so I experimented with alsa/oss/jack. Now I have no sound whatsoever . I've run through this guide, down to compiling drivers, and everything installed properly, it seems. But aplay -l gives device_list:221: no soundcards found...
lspci -v does bring up my soundcard still:

robert@ubuntu:~$ sudo lspci -v | grep -A 7 Mult
0000:00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
        Subsystem: IBM: Unknown device 0567
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
        I/O ports at 1c00 [size=256]
        I/O ports at 1880 [size=64]
        Memory at a8000800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
        Memory at a8000400 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

Unfortunately alsamixer gives me:
alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

I may be missing some packages, as I tried installing a number of things and uninstalling/purging many others to remove alsa and just use esd again. I'm not sure what I need anymore.

My sound card is the intel ICH6, which I think corresponds to snd-hda-intel. If it helps:

robert@ubuntu:~$ lsmod |  grep snd
snd_hda_intel          20080  0
snd_hda_codec         101088  1 snd_hda_intel
snd_pcm               108388  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec
snd_timer              28516  1 snd_pcm
snd                    69324  4 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore              10784  2 kfusd,snd
snd_page_alloc         11912  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm

Package list (is something missing?)

robert@ubuntu:~$ dpkg -l | grep alsa | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2
alsa-base
alsa-modules-2.6.15-27-686
alsa-oss
alsa-source
alsa-tools
alsa-tools-gui
alsa-utils
alsamixergui
gnome-alsamixer
gstreamer0.10-alsa
gstreamer0.8-alsa
libbio2jack0
libbio2jack0-dev
libclalsadrv-dev
libclalsadrv1
libesd-alsa0
libpt-plugins-alsa
libsdl1.2debian-alsa
python2.4-alsaaudio
vlc-plugin-alsa

and

robert@ubuntu:~$ dpkg -l | grep esd | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f2
gstreamer0.10-esd
gstreamer0.8-esd
libesd-alsa0
libesd0
libesd0-dev
vlc-plugin-esd

Basically I can modprobe my soundcard but not aplay -l it.

[pneaveill]

Pinballkid:

Been thinking about this for a couple days. Goofy thought that I am willing to be wrong on: Is the USB sound card being seen perhaps as a CD or other media type, rather than a sound card device?

[pinballkid]

Pinballkid:

Been thinking about this for a couple days. Goofy thought that I am willing to be wrong on: Is the USB sound card being seen perhaps as a CD or other media type, rather than a sound card device?

Amazingly I've just put my usb sound card in today and a little popup comes up and tells me that a sound card has been detected and I should change the settings in sound preference! woot!

This never happened before, so perhaps it has something to do with the latest kernel upgrade. Whatever the reason it is definitely a good thing, as my usb sound card is now being detected and is listed when I run aplay -l:

stephen@stephen:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: HDA Generic [HDA Generic]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: default [C-Media USB Headphone Set ], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Unfortunately still no sound though, though I have yet to go through the guide again. I have unmuted the channels and I'm seeing flashing lights on the device when I play music so I must be cose.

[escape]

I fixed my problem above by removing some jack dependencies., so please ignore now.

[Amorphous_Snake]

I once had a problem with audio (probably after a kernel update), I installed a fresh copy of alsa-mixer as indicated in the guide and it didn't solve the problem. But the probelm just got solved all by itself!

Now I have the same problem again. I don't remember what exactly I did last time because I did nothing! So, I tried reinstalling a fresh copy of alsa as in the guide. I also compiled a driver (my first Linux compilation!) and still it didn't work.

I now get an error with "sudo modprobe snd-" saying "FATAL: Module snd_ not found."

I have all the volumes maxed out in alsa-mixer. And the strange thing is that a program like Beep used to say that another program is occupying my card. Now it stopped saying so, but I still have no audio.

The audio is not completely lost. Say for a 5 minute song, I get audio for about half a second, but this happens randomly and not at a specific place and doesn't happen everytime.

I am a Linux beginner by the way.