Arch Linux

ultra_violence

Member

From: Ireland

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 30

ALSA/OSS Sound issues

Greetings community

I successfully (sort of) upgrade my Arch install to 64bit. It's all going good
so far bar a few sound related issues.

First and foremost, I'd been using Alsa on my previous install and everything
worked just great but since I upgraded, no sound and alsaconf doesn't
recognise my card. I decided to give OSS a try, and I thought I'd been
successful as XMMS works just perfectly, although occasionally with some
sampling distortion.

I get nothing with either smplayer, totem, xine or vlc, however. I did manage
to get output from vlc when specifying an output device, but it was plagued
with the same distortion as XMMS. I'm about all out of ideas at this point.

Has anyone got any ideas as to what might be causing the problems or
if there are any alternatives?

lspci | grep Audio gives me

00:0f.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP55 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

Not sure what other outputs would be of any use. Let me know if I can be
more informative.

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We are Pentium Borg. Division is futile, you will be approximated.

ChoK

Member

From: France

Registered: 2008-10-01

Posts: 346

Re: ALSA/OSS Sound issues

What did you upgrade ? (look into /var/log/pacman.log)
What is the output of aplay -l
What error does alsaconf throw?
What is the output of lsmod|grep snd (when alsa is installed)
Just to be sure alsamixer doesn't work right (if it works, verify that channels are unmuted)

The distorted sound sounds like bad news. Do you have another distro liveCD or a windows system to check if your soundcard is not dead?

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ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: ALSA/OSS Sound issues

Do those apps support OSS in the first place? You don't say what youv'e done, so its quite hard to offer any ideas.

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ultra_violence

Member

From: Ireland

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 30

Re: ALSA/OSS Sound issues

@ChoK

Did a fresh install of Arch64 now. Reinstalled all of my packages from my prior install of
32bit Arch. lspci still reports the card on the PCI bus as above.

aplay finds no cards:

[root@overl0rd ~]# aplay -l
aplay: device_list:235: no soundcards found...

alsaconf says "No supported PnP or PCI card found" and "No legacy drivers are available".

lsmod | grep snd has no output, i.e. alsa modules aren't loaded.

alsamixer produces an error:

[root@overl0rd ~]# alsamixer 
cannot open mixer: No such file or directory

As for the distortion, well it's non-existent in XMMS playing MP3s, but in mplayer for
specific files, it's there. Maybe something to do with a codec or something, I don't know.
I'd be happy to get back to a working alsa setup like it was before at this point as none
of these issues presented themselves then.

@ngoonee
Yeah, those apps support OSS. My summary is as informing as I could make it.

I'd rather not reinstall 32bit Arch as the upgrade to 64bit was a time consuming endeavour.
Can you guys suggest any alternatives?

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We are Pentium Borg. Division is futile, you will be approximated.