Arch Linux

KylieGS

Member

Registered: 2018-02-19

Posts: 53

[SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

As some point in the last couple of weeks my USB microphone started having some odd behaviour on linux. (Behaviour on windows is unchanged).

For context. The microphone has a sound card with a headphone jack. There is some sort of onboard loopback between the microphone and the headphone jack. This used to appear independent of the system (and even works in grub) so I thought it was a literal hardware loopback.

However now, I cannot get audio to play through the mic, including this loopback audio.

The original sound setup was with alsa, pulse, and jack. With pulse just passing audio from software to jack. The microphone io were loaded with

alsa_out -r48000 -j "Headset:Out" -d hw:Microphone -q3 2>&1 >>~/log/alsa_out &
alsa_in -r48000 -j"Blue Yeti:In" -d hw:Microphone 2>&1 >>~/log/alsa_in &

The input still works (I can record from it). The output does not.

In an effort to debug I removed jack and tried using just pulse.
pulse CANNOT see the card at all. It does not exist in pavucontrol or elsewhere.
alsa CAN see the card. It exists as before in alsamixer and alpay -l

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
[...]
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALC1220 Digital [ALC1220 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: Microphone [Yeti Stereo Microphone], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Last edited by KylieGS (2019-05-01 21:09:17)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,237

Re: [SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

Is something hogging your card? Output of

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

KylieGS

Member

Registered: 2018-02-19

Posts: 53

Re: [SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

Is something hogging your card? Output of

sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

                      USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC1:  kylie     F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/controlC2:  kylie     F.... jackdbus
/dev/snd/pcmC0D0c:   kylie     F...m alsa_in
/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p:   kylie     F...m alsa_out
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0c:   kylie     F...m jackdbus
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0p:   kylie     F...m jackdbus

I don't know how to interpret this

Last edited by KylieGS (2019-05-01 19:25:55)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,237

Re: [SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

Your card is being hogged by jackdbus, pulseaudio wont be able to query the card. From what I know of jack/pulse setups, which admittedly isn't much, if you want your pulse clients to go to jack which will in turn access the correct sound cards you should be able to pass them to a jack sink on pulse's side instead.

What is your output for

pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks

KylieGS

Member

Registered: 2018-02-19

Posts: 53

Re: [SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

Your card is being hogged by jackdbus, pulseaudio wont be able to query the card. From what I know of jack/pulse setups, which admittedly isn't much, if you want your pulse clients to go to jack which will in turn access the correct sound cards you should be able to pass them to a jack sink on pulse's side instead.

What is your output for

pacmd list-cards
pacmd list-sinks

Having disabled jack:

                     USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  kylie      1318 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/controlC1:  kylie      1318 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC1D0c:   kylie      1318 F...m pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC1D0p:   kylie      1318 F...m pulseaudio

pacmd gives card 0 and card 1. Not the USB mic (full output here: http://ix.io/1HMk)
list-sinks gives only the sink on the inbuilt sound card (http://ix.io/1HMm)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,237

Re: [SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

alright then it really seems like a deeper layer, did you configure anything on ALSA's side? What do you get for

dmesg | grep snd
aplay -L
#Kill pulse, start it with verbose logging
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket
pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio -vvv

KylieGS

Member

Registered: 2018-02-19

Posts: 53

Re: [SOLVED] USB Sound Card no longer working with Arch.

Okay. After some fiddling (pulseaudio.socket was enabled and messing with me) I have pulseaudio seeing the device! That seems to be an unrelated issue to what I was having with jack. A couple of years ago I seem to have made a udev rule to pulseaudio ignores the microphone (so jack could deal with it directly).

Audio output still doesn't work though.

Tests from before:

                     USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  kylie      4371 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/controlC1:  kylie      4371 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/controlC2:  kylie      4371 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC1D0c:   kylie      4371 F...m pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC1D0p:   kylie      4371 F...m pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0c:   kylie      4371 F...m pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC2D0p:   kylie      4371 F...m pulseaudio

List cards can now see it:
http://ix.io/1HMA

I fixed it. It was muted in ALSA. I just didn't notice because I was focusing on pa.
Feel silly.

Last edited by KylieGS (2019-05-01 21:08:28)