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ninian

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From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 726

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[Solved] Conflict: ATI Radeon HDMI vs onboard sound crashes PulseAudio

Firstly, please excuse my ignorance about audio issues!

I have a mate running Arch who has an ATI Radeon HD5450 graphics card (using radeon driver) and onboard sound also. He doesn't want to use the graphics card for audio purposes at all. He's getting (seemingly) random switches between PulseAudio thinking its default audio sink is the onboard sound and the graphics card. When the latter happens, PulseAudio crashes out.
(Tried setting the kernel boot parameter 'radeon.audio=1' to try and make the HDMI audio work, but to no avail. Though card is in radeon driver matrix saying HDMI audio feature should work with this card.)

Issuing these commands usually gets things up and running again:

pulseaudio --start && pacmd set-default-sink alsa_output.xxxxx.analog-stereo

where alsa_output.xxxxx.analog-stereo is the appropriate string from the 'Default Sink' line of the ouput from the command:

pactl stat

Tried switching the HDMI input/output off using pavucontrol but after an indeterminate time it creeps back and kills off PulseAudio.

Can the graphics card be blacklisted as a soundcard by PulseAudio or Alsa in some way?
Any ideas to resolve this most welcome!

PS: Had a look through the Arch Wiki on PulseAudio and it helped quite a bit with understanding pactl and pacmd commands.

Edit @29/01/14: Problem solved - by going deeper to kernel level!
From the wiki:

If both devices use the same module then we can use the *enable* parameter from snd-hda-intel module, it's an array of booleans that can enable/disable the desired sound card [put in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf]:
e.g
options snd-hda-intel enable=1,0

Useful commands to check situation:

cat /proc/asound/cards
cat /proc/asound/modules
aplay -l

Last edited by ninian (2014-01-29 23:14:35)