[Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

s0lder · 2012-01-31 22:45:15

Hello. I just reinstalled Arch , and have found that the sound on the new installation doesn't work at all. I've installed alsamixer, unmuted the channels, and followed all of the instructions on the wiki to no avail. I know that my modules are loaded, because I've custom compiled my kernel and set all the sound drivers to be built in (using the same config as my old installation, which did have working sound).

Here is the relevant output of lspci:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)

A listing of the devices in /dev/snd show that the devices do exist, which the wiki suggests that they should:

total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root       60 Jan 31 17:09 by-path
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  7 Jan 31 17:09 controlC0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  6 Jan 31 17:09 hwC0D0
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  5 Jan 31 17:09 hwC0D3
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  4 Jan 31 17:09 pcmC0D0c
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  3 Jan 31 17:30 pcmC0D0p
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  2 Jan 31 17:09 pcmC0D3p
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116,  1 Jan 31 17:09 seq
crw-rw---- 1 root audio 116, 33 Jan 31 17:09 timer

And my user is a member of the audio group, as it should be.

I'm probably missing something stupid, but I'd appreciate help with this. Thanks.

Edit: If it's helpful to have more information, here is the output of lspci -v:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
	Subsystem: Dell Device 0447
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 47
	Memory at fbd00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel

And here is the some codec information that a few other sites said was relevant:

[michael@darwinson ~]$ cat /proc/asound/card0/codec*
Codec: IDT 92HD81B1X5
Codec: Intel IbexPeak HDMI

Last edited by s0lder (2012-02-02 00:29:56)

kichi · 2012-02-01 06:02:14

I have your same sound card. My sound got broken after the latest update to kmod and udev.

If you can see some message like this in your boot log in /var/logs it could be the same issue I faced

" udevd[188]: seq 1352 '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0' killed and " udevd[188]: seq 1329 '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/0000:02:00.1' killed" "

The fix worked in my case was to remove sound.conf (or could be alsa-base.conf ) in /etc/modprobe.d and reboot the machine.

Refer this thread for more info

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p1050859

Hope this helps

s0lder · 2012-02-01 19:23:31

kichi wrote:

The fix worked in my case was to remove sound.conf (or could be alsa-base.conf ) in /etc/modprobe.d and reboot the machine.

I never had a /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf file in the first place. I do get that line about 50% of the time, but I was browsing that thread, and I thought that they had boiled down to a wifi driver module problem? I'm going to try to recompile my kernel with the modules being external, and see if that works.

Edit: Here is the relevant line:

udevd[124]: seq 1237 '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:12:00.0' killed

Edit 2: After more research, I've noticed that the device id shown above is not the device id of my sound card, leading me to think that these are separate issues.

Last edited by s0lder (2012-02-02 00:03:37)

s0lder · 2012-02-02 00:38:22

Alright, so I've solved the problem, and ALSA now works. Here is my understanding of what went wrong:

ALSA was defaulting to the correct card, and the modules were fine (they were compiled into my kernel). What was going wrong was that ALSA was defaulting to the wrong device, not the wrong card. I'm by no means an ALSA guru, so I'm not sure what the distinction is here, but adding the following to my ~/.asoundrc file (or /etc/asound.conf globally) solved the problem for me:

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

I noticed the distinction when I ran the following, which, correct me if I'm wrong, forces it to use device 0?

aplay -D hw:0,0 sound.wav

I got the idea to run that from the docs here.
Anyway, the above command did work, which led me to add the setting to my asoundrc file, and now sound is fully functional! Thanks to everyone who helped here and on IRC.

Last edited by s0lder (2012-02-02 00:39:27)

Gusar · 2012-02-02 00:43:40

There's just one huge problem with what you've done: you can only play one sound at a time, as what you've set goes straight to the hardware instead of going through dmix. There's a better option using module parameters - see this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p1045829

s0lder · 2012-02-02 01:00:01

Gusar wrote:

There's just one huge problem with what you've done: you can only play one sound at a time, as what you've set goes straight to the hardware instead of going through dmix.

*Sigh* you're right. I didn't realize that. I guess I can edit my kernel command line to pass parameters. Is there not a type setting (dmix or something?) that I can use instead of hw?

Gusar · 2012-02-02 01:04:17

s0lder wrote:

Is there not a type setting (dmix or something?) that I can use instead of hw?

It's not that simple. Manually setting up dmix is... not fun. Unless you're a masochist . Go with the module parameters, that way you get the card order you want and alsa will take care of dmix automatically.

s0lder · 2012-02-02 01:47:28

The module parameters didn't work for me, however the following .asoundrc did:

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "swmixer"
    #card Intel
    #device 0
}

pcm.swmixer {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1234
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100
    }
}

ctl.swmixer {
    type hw
    card 0
}

All is well now. Thanks!

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-31 22:45:15

[Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#2 2012-02-01 06:02:14

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#3 2012-02-01 19:23:31

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#4 2012-02-02 00:38:22

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#5 2012-02-02 00:43:40

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#6 2012-02-02 01:00:01

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#7 2012-02-02 01:04:17

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

#8 2012-02-02 01:47:28

Re: [Solved] No Sound with ALSA and an Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Card

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