Arch Linux

cory.schwartz

Member

Registered: 2010-06-13

Posts: 11

Alsa does not select correct sound card. SOLVED

I have onboard sound and do not have any additional sound cards installed. Alsa detects two soundcards, but for some reason seems to prefer the one that doesn't work. I am honestly not sure what the other audio device is; I do not have a second sound card installed, nor a modem or a PC speaker or any other audio device that I know of. It has always been that way, and I didn't look into it any deeper than that. I have been using Arch Linux for a about four years and the audio has worked flawlessly until I re-installed a few days ago.

For reference, the HDA NVidia sound card is the one I want to output sound. The non-working one is Conexant CX8801.

My symptoms are as follows:

$ aplay -l 
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC883 Analog [ALC883 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC883 Digital [ALC883 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

# cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [CX8801         ]: CX88x - Conexant CX8801
                      Conexant CX8801 at 0xf9000000
 1 [NVidia         ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
                      HDA NVidia at 0xfe024000 irq 23

As you can see, the Conexant CX8801 (the wrong card) takes the index 0 position.

My usual alsa setup routine is to run the alsaconf script. The alsaconf script edits /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf for me, where it should explicitly identify the HDA NVidia card as index 0. In the sound.conf below, alsaconf generated the first two lines. I wrote the third line as a course of troubleshooting, but it still does not work.

$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf
#THESE LINES WERE GENERATED BY ALSACONF SCRIPT
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
#THIS LINE WAS GENERATED BY ME
option snd-hda-intel index=0

$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf
#
# /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf (for v2.6 kernels)
# NOTICE THERE ARE NO CONFIGURATIONS IN THIS FILE. EMPTY.

I am by no means an alsa guru, so that's why I've enlisted the help of the forums. Tell me, what am I forgetting? What don't I know?

Last edited by cory.schwartz (2010-06-16 02:52:06)

Xyne

Administrator/PM

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,965

Website

Re: Alsa does not select correct sound card. SOLVED

This may be related to this problem. Have you tried adding the Intel driver to the MODULES array in /etc/rc.conf?

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Cdh

Member

Registered: 2009-02-03

Posts: 1,098

Re: Alsa does not select correct sound card. SOLVED

Install asoundconf http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23382
do

asoundconf list

to find out the correct name, then do

asoundconf set-default-card bla

to set the default card.

asoundconf creates a ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf and sets an include for that fil in ~/.asoundrc

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cory.schwartz

Member

Registered: 2010-06-13

Posts: 11

Re: Alsa does not select correct sound card. SOLVED

Thanks for the help, Cdh,

Your solution only affects individual logins, so it's not quite ideal, but it does make the sound work. Thanks.

rransom

Member

Registered: 2010-04-26

Posts: 92

Re: Alsa does not select correct sound card. SOLVED

Try moving ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf to /etc/asound.conf.