What are the most common ALSA problems?

beandog

So, I'm thinking about writing up a FAQ / guide *if* we need one re ALSA. For some reason, people have the hardest time figuring it out, and for the life of me .... I can't figure out why. These are all the problems I, personally, have ever run into with ALSA:

Call me lucky, I guess.

Still, I see a lot of issues with ALSA with Gentoo and I keep wondering how the heck people either get confused or make them so complex. I haven't been able to identify any patterns, either, so I could use some help. So, if someone can help fill me in on what some common issues are, I'd be glad to know.

And, oh, this thread is not the place to post your support questions, thanks, I'm just looking for common problems and solutions to.

Specifically, here's what I'm looking for:

I realize a lot of these questions are pretty open-ended, but I'm trying to narrow down what I see as a generic problem "people having issue with setting up sound" to narrowing it down to specific issues that occur most frequently, and find the causes. Thanks for your feedback!
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DooBeDooBeDo · Apprentice Joined: 21 Aug 2002 Posts: 220 Location: UK

For snd-hda-intel there are often problems from incorrect or non-existant

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

I wrote a guide for the wiki, after seeing countless forum threads of screwed-up kernel compilations. Here's an old copy, due to the great wiki "whoops that's what backups are for" disaster.

RedSquirrel · Guru Joined: 22 Apr 2008 Posts: 336

After adding a regular user to the audio group, it is necessary to logout and login again for the change to take effect. It might be an idea to add that to the ALSA guide or to your FAQ.

I have had no trouble with ALSA at all.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 5:13 am Post subject:

The only issue I had with ALSA was addressed in a bug report. I have had no trouble since I did the fix offered in the bug report. As far as setup, I found it easy.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 6:16 am Post subject:

beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 6:17 am Post subject:

beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 6:18 am Post subject:

DooBeDooBeDo · Apprentice Joined: 21 Aug 2002 Posts: 220 Location: UK

beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 3:36 pm Post subject:

DooBeDooBeDo · Apprentice Joined: 21 Aug 2002 Posts: 220 Location: UK

The model I use is "6stack-dig"

Ubuntu have an excellent guide for this driver: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto

iplayfast · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 5:49 pm Post subject:

Regards to your blog post on things we come across that would be helpful if they were documented better.

1. emerge blocks and how to get past them.
1.1 useful utilities available on gentoo and how to use them to get around emerge blocks (reverse dependancy build, equery etc)
2. guide to installing software on Gentoo that doesn't have an ebuild
3. guide to installing network printers specifically in my case a windows network printer that every windows box can use easily but Linux can barely see.
3.1 guide to using scanner on above network printer. If it is even possible.

that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 7:50 pm Post subject:

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 8:04 pm Post subject:

The only problem I ever had with ALSA was several versions ago, no sound when "Aggressive power-saving on HD-audio" was turned on. A bug in Intel HDA driver I'd guess.
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iplayfast · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 8:06 pm Post subject:

Well Alsa has never actually been much of a problem for me. HOWEVER, trying to get midi rosegarden, jack and all that stuff to work doesn't ever work as advertised. Perhaps if you feel so inclined you can explore those.

beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 8:44 pm Post subject:

beandog · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 8:45 pm Post subject:

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 9:15 pm Post subject:

cynyr · n00b Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 21

getting dmix to work. I keep hearing that it should be on by default now, but on my card (see below) i still need to set up dmix to get more than one thing to make sound. For my chipset this is very very poorly documented (I probably should add that to gentoo-wiki). The headphone switch is still not working automatically, the sound card has a headphone switch, it would be "nice" if there was an option to use or not use it, or even better as a second audio out interface. So that maybe i could have some audio go out the speakers, and some out the headphones at the same time.

stuNNed2 · Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 1:28 am Post subject: OSS / ALSA integration

For the longest time I had a card that only worked with OSS drivers. Then they started working in ALSA. Now with ALSA I read sound servers won't be needed anymore unless you are serving your audio over the network. So basic fundamentals of explaining things are needed I would think, like:

What is OSS. What is ALSA. What is a soundserver. Do you really need a soundserver, etc.

I am running only ALSA with no soundserver with my current soundcard and it works fine.

Also why Gentoo ships it's own /etc/init.d/alsasound instead of the one shipped by ALSA would be a good hint.

BT · Guru Joined: 13 Jun 2004 Posts: 318

I've had no trouble configuring ALSA over the years, although I did notice some inconsistency when recommending whether to compile ALSA statically or as modules. The ALSA documentation recommends that users should compile as modules, however the elog from the alsa-utils ebuild appears to recommend the opposite.

beandog · Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 3:29 am Post subject: Re: OSS / ALSA integration

beandog

ABCDwp · Retired Dev Joined: 26 Mar 2006 Posts: 79

FireBurn · Posted: Wed Aug 26, 2009 10:43 am Post subject:

The only issue I've had recently (that wasn't pulseaudio related) was switching on the new audio jack feature which seemed to kill sound on both machines that had it enabled. I think this was around 2.6.31-rc1 time so I'm not sure if this has been fixed since then

I've never had my card auto detected correctly by the driver however the fallback it uses seems to work fine on both cards

I wish there was an easier way to figure out which is the correct option to use and a way to feed this information back to the ALSA devs to get it added to the driver for auto selection in the next version

Grumble grumble

Oh and I've never gotten HDMI audio working either but I think that's an xf86-video-intel/radeon issue