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#1 2021-06-06 17:53:56

Kobrakai
Member
Registered: 2021-05-22
Posts: 14

No sound roughly once every 5 times I start my computer

Hi,

I had a great deal of trouble getting my Creative Soundblaster Z sound card to work in Arch. In the end I had to use hdajackretask to disable the jack auto detection and re-map the ports which got it working.

Now it works perfectly, except I have a strange problem where every so often I will boot into Arch and I have no sound. No matter what I do I cannot get the sound to work, even restarting my PC usually doesn't fix it. The only way to get it working again is by turning off the PC for a few seconds and doing a cold boot.

Most of the time this doesn't happen, I'd say it happens roughly every 5 days which is what makes it so strange. I don't know what information I can give you to diagnose this as I don't really know where to start. I'm using pulse audio and I have the alsa firmware installed. How can I figure this out?

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#2 2021-06-07 13:17:06

linuxfan2021
Member
Registered: 2021-04-30
Posts: 12

Re: No sound roughly once every 5 times I start my computer

Try restarting the audio server when this happens, it could help.


btw i use arch

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#3 2021-06-07 13:50:27

Kobrakai
Member
Registered: 2021-05-22
Posts: 14

Re: No sound roughly once every 5 times I start my computer

linuxfan2021 wrote:

Try restarting the audio server when this happens, it could help.

This doesn't fix it. As I said in my post even restarting my computer doesn't fix it, it needs to be a cold boot.

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#4 2021-06-07 14:21:37

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 21,409

Re: No sound roughly once every 5 times I start my computer

Creative Soundblaster Zs are a finicky beast, I suspect it fails to load the firmware/DSP core. Check/compare dmesg between working and not working boot. One thing I suspect you can try without a reboot is reloading the PCI device: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/245184

FWIW that the driver support here is as "good" as it is now is a fairly recent development. when I first had a system with such a card it didn't work at all and I ended up opting to buy a cheap Xonar DGX for like 30$ (it was on sale retail would've been 60ish) which worked well

Last edited by V1del (2021-06-07 16:12:42)

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#5 2021-06-13 09:18:27

Kobrakai
Member
Registered: 2021-05-22
Posts: 14

Re: No sound roughly once every 5 times I start my computer

Sorry for not replying sooner but I had to wait for it to happen again.

I tried comparing the output from dmesg using a diff tool but it was a bit ackward because of the timestamps, memory addresses, etc. being different. I don't really know what I'm looking for but the parts that seemed to be related to the sound card were the same between a working/non-working boot:

[    2.785214] snd_hda_codec_ca0132 hdaudioC1D1: autoconfig for Sound Blaster Z: line_outs=1 (0xf/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0) type:hp
[    2.785218] snd_hda_codec_ca0132 hdaudioC1D1:    speaker_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
[    2.785221] snd_hda_codec_ca0132 hdaudioC1D1:    hp_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
[    2.785223] snd_hda_codec_ca0132 hdaudioC1D1:    mono: mono_out=0x0
[    2.785225] snd_hda_codec_ca0132 hdaudioC1D1:    inputs:
[    2.785226] snd_hda_codec_ca0132 hdaudioC1D1:      Mic=0x12

I'm thinking about swapping for a different card. How did you find the Xonar? I've heard these have good Linux compatibility but I've also heard the sound quality is not that great compared to the Soundblaster Z.

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