ES1371 ALSA blues (fuzzy noise instead of sound) [solved]

[SDraconis]

I'm having interesting issues with my ES1371 and ALSA. Instead of getting the sounds that I am trying to play, I get odd fuzzyness from my speakers. The fuzzyness varies when I switch between windows or jump around in an MP3. In order to even hear enough of the fuzzyness, I have to have my volume up a good ways either on my speakers or in alsamixer's PCI setting. I have tried this with the ALSA stuff compiled as modules in the kernel with OSS emulation, and then without any sound stuff (besides soundcore) in the kernel and alsa-driver with oss USE flag.

alsaconf finds everything fine and loading ALSA from the initscript has no errors. Also, I am sure that the appropriate things are unmuted and given ample volume in alsamixer. I used XMMS and alsaplayer to play the test MP3's. For testing, I booted into Knoppix 3.7 (which I believe uses OSS) and got the "Initiating startup sequence" working perfectly. I know that this card works with ALSA as this machine used to have Debian installed with ALSA compiled into the kernel.

Output of lspci | grep audio:

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0000:00:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 08)

Output of lsmod:

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Module                  Size  Used by
snd_seq_midi            6720  0 
snd_pcm_oss            48000  0 
snd_mixer_oss          17152  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_seq_dummy           2724  0 
snd_seq_oss            34272  0 
snd_seq_midi_event      5728  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_oss
snd_seq                50448  6 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_m
idi_event
snd_ens1371            19588  0 
snd_rawmidi            20576  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_ens1371
snd_seq_device          7148  5 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,s
nd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec         82940  1 snd_ens1371
snd_pcm                82504  3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_ens1371,snd_ac97_codec
snd_timer              21604  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd                    47940  11 snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq
_oss,snd_seq,snd_ens1371,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_t
imer
soundcore               7392  1 snd
snd_page_alloc          7652  1 snd_pcm
nvidia               3465724  12 
agpgart                29608  1 nvidia
cls_u32                 6660  1 
sch_htb                15872  1 

[lost+found]

Do you have the "IEC958" switch muted? It caused some noise on my Ensoniq ES1371 AudioPCI... It can be done in KMix or in a terminal:

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$ alsamixer

.

I don't know what IEC958 means, but I'm sure that I don't need it.

[SDraconis]

I had already tried messing with that setting. I went through alsamixer and tried every combination of turning things on and off I could think of. Also, I think that setting pertains to digital or SPDIF output, as that is what it does on my other system with onboard AC97 SPDIF through digital coaxial.

I again repeat that I practically get NO SOUND except for this light fuzzyness, which is how I know that the sound card is even responding to the computer with the drivers going.

[gizmo.tar.bz23]

hi,

i had the same problems here with 2.6.13, but i managed to fix it, so here's what i did:

download alsa-driver-1.0.10-rc1

extract the files and look for ../alsa-driver-1.0.10rc1/alsa-kernel/pci/ens1370.c

copy this file to your kernel directory, for example /usr/src/linux/sound/pci/

then rebuild your kernel and it should work again.

[SDraconis]

extract the files and look for ../alsa-driver-1.0.10rc1/alsa-kernel/pci/ens1370.c

copy this file to your kernel directory, for example /usr/src/linux/sound/pci/

then rebuild your kernel and it should work again.

When I rebuild, I am assuming I should have alsa then compiled with the kernel as opposed to the alsa-driver ebuild? I don't really see how this would work when I've already tried using the alsa-driver modules rather than the modules that come with the kernel.

[SDraconis]

I went ahead and tried the solution posted, only now I get

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# modprobe snd-ens1371
FATAL: Error inserting snd_ens1371 (/lib/modules/2.6.12.5/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1371.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)

I should note that I am using kernel 2.6.12.5 rather than 2.6.13

[SDraconis]

Solved, kind of. Somehow building a sound monolythic kernel without OSS emulation support in ALSA worked.