Arch Linux

Valso

Member

Registered: 2021-04-22

Posts: 82

[SELF SOLVED] C-Media 8738 (sound card) multitasking?

Recently I bought this sound card because the generic driver for the integrated realtek card sucks (for many reasons that are not important for this topic). So far the C-Media works fine and a lot better than the realtek but there's one problem: if I play music and a movie simultaneously, I get an error for pcm device being busy.
I Googled a lot, also asked an AI how to enable the sound card's multitasking and found this old topic: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=275656 However, the solution seth offered (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 5#p2031605) 2-3 posts before that topic's end doesn't quite fit my case because:
• I've disabled the onboard audio (realtek ALC897) in the BIOS/UEFI settings, so no need for snd_hda_intel.
• I don't know what the "option" will be for C-Media nor do I have any idea how to check what module has been loaded in the kernel for this sound card.

I also put this

pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card 0
    device 0
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 0
}

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmix"
}

in ~/.asoundrc. The first two "columns" are helpful for making the C-Media sound card appear in Wine, so that I can play Windows games with a proper downmixing to 2.1 channels. The third "column" is supposed to enable a dmix plugin which would enable the sound card's multitasking but unfortunately enabling that plugin fixed nothing and I still can't play sound from two sources simultaneously. Which means that I can't play a game while listening to music at the same time.
I'm still reading through the wiki about dmix and trying a few things but I have a feeling I won't be able to solve that on my own. So... help, please?

Last edited by Valso (2025-04-05 21:28:18)

Valso

Member

Registered: 2021-04-22

Posts: 82

Re: [SELF SOLVED] C-Media 8738 (sound card) multitasking?

Seeing that nobody replied, in the meantime I accidentally found a workaround for the multitasking I was looking for: in Audacious set "SDL output" and in SMPlayer set ALSA. With these settings I can run both music and a movie which now means I'll be able to play a game and listen to music at the same time without error messages about busy devices.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,520

Re: [SELF SOLVED] C-Media 8738 (sound card) multitasking?

That config makes no sense and I'm assuming your workaround just happens to work because you're actually using pipewire/pulseaudio on SDL with audacious in which case the proper fix would be to remove that .asoundrc and install pipewire-pulse,pipewire-alsa and lib32-libpulse lib32-libpipewire.