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my experience going from on-board to PCI-card sound [solved]
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dcljr
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 20 Aug 2005
Posts: 139
Location: Austin, TX

PostPosted: Sat Dec 31, 2011 10:18 pm    Post subject: my experience going from on-board to PCI-card sound [solved] Reply with quote

I'm posting this "solved" problem for the benefit of others who are searching for fixes to the same kind of problem.

About a month ago I had to install a new power supply when my old one died. After that, my on-board sound ("nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio" / using the "HDA Intel" driver built into the kernel) didn't work. Not only could I not get any sound from desktop applications or even the speaker-test command, I didn't hear any "electrical contact" sort of noises when I plugged in and removed headphones from the audio jack.

So, I figured it was hopeless, and went out and bought just about the cheapest PCI sound card I could find: a PPA Int'l "4 Channel PCI Sound Card" (which turns out to be a "VIA Technologies Inc. VT1720/24 [Envy24PT/HT] PCI Multi-Channel Audio Controller" that uses the "ICE1724" driver, which I elected to build outside the kernel as the "snd-ice1724" module), but then I couldn't make that work either!

This time (after following the ALSA Guide) I could get speaker-test to work ("front left… front right…"), but I still couldn't get anything else to play sound. I tried setting ALSA_CARDS="ice1724" in /etc/make.conf and recompiling/upgrading all the packages depending on alsa-lib and/or having the alsa USE flag. No difference.

There was a new volume control for my desktop, gnome-audio, that got installed along with pulseaudio during this process of upgrading stuff, and I noticed that it was seeing both sound cards. So was alsamixer. Unfortunately, just selecting/configuring the new sound card in both of these didn't work.

But that got me to thinking… maybe the problem was that the original audio controller, although seemingly dead, was somehow preventing the new one from being used. I realized that I probably should go into my BIOS and see if I could disable the on-board audio controller. I did so, and the sound worked after that.

So, the moral of the story: when you're switching from on-board sound to a sound card, you need to disable the on-board audio controller in your BIOS!

Might seem obvious to some, but it eluded me for the longest time…
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josehw
n00b
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Joined: 02 Jan 2012
Posts: 13

PostPosted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 6:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Good job man. Please put it on wiki too
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