Sometimes no sound on startup...

[GrandJu]

Hi all,

It's my first post here and I just want to say one thing before starting complaining:
AVLinux rocks!! I love it  

I just have one problem with my new PC (Intel Core i5 + MSI mainboard H61MA-E35).
Sometimes when starting I have no sound, there is no speaker icon in the right down corner and nothing can perform sound: Jack, Totem, iceweasel...

I don't know what to check, can someone help me please?

Ju

[soppel]

Welcome Ju!

Speaker icon? Should I have that? I don't have one, but who cares about the icon, you want sound.

Do you have one soundcard? I don't know the rest of your configuration, but sometimes the video-card has an soundcard as well.

What you could do is start 'alsamixer'     ( open a terminal and type: alsamixer)
press F6 and see what the options are. If you see more than one, you just choose the right one.

Me for example has this problem with the hdmi sound at my Nvidia videocard. After boot I start alsamixer and jack and then everything works fine. Maybe there are other ways, but this works for me.

[GrandJu]

Hi Soppel,

Sorry for the late reply, I was very busy this week.
I check alsamixer and there were 2 soundcards (embedded soundcards on mother board) activated.
I choose one and it seems ok but I have just tried to reboot 3 times.

Thanks a lot for your Help!!
Ju

[soppel]

No problem that you took your time.

If you know which card you use all the time you can start alsamixer as:
alsamixer -c0    or alsamixer -c1  depending which card you use.

OR...

You can disable one of the cards in the BIOS.  ( that is maybe the easiest and best way)

[GrandJu]

Hi all,

As I still had the problem, I continued to investigate by myself.
I found the problem came from my midi controllers. I have a Roland NanoKontrol and Akai LPD8.
It seems they are considered as sound cards by the system. So often, one of those were set to index 0 at system startup.
That's why I feel I had no sound for alsa application. In fact there were sound but I had to select my soundcard with QJackCtl for example.

And now the solution, it is quite simple in fact:
- Edit the alsal-base.conf file
gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

- Set index 0 for the sound card you want to be default at startup, add following line:
#added by me to select default card
options NVidia index=0

- Of course NVidia is my soundcard, replace it with your soundcard name. You can find it with command:
cat /proc/asound/cards

Have fun!
Ju

[GrandJu]

In fact it is not solved... 

It is strange because on sunday I restarted my PC ten times to be sure.
But since yesterday I had the problem several times...
Any advice welcome!

[soppel]

Hei Ju!

Yesterday I tried your solution, but it did not work here either.
I thought my problem was to find the right name of my Emu1616. ( I find it in my system as audigy2, EMU1010b, E-mu10k1 etc)

So I tried to set my other card the HD-Nvidia at index 2.
But that worked neither.

My guess, is to give them both another IRQ. They have the same in my system.
I don't know if that is possible, I was just reading some about those stuff. It is new for me.
But I guess when they have a different IRQ, it should be possible to give the E-mu  ( and you your Nvidia) a better number.

edit.

Maybe you have to take a look here: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Nvidia
choose your card and click 'details'
There is also information about the modprob thing.

[chkneater]

Sounds like a card needs to be blacklisted...

[soppel]

Your words, remind me to something I tried long ago.

http://hennr.name/2011/06/29/how-to-remove-nvidia-hdmi-sound-cards-under-linux

It works, but after that I had some strange behaviors. F.e. when you start alsamixer you get the message that there is no such program.
After 2 or 3 reboots you have alsamixer. And than not and so-on.
After all, a irritating solution.

[chkneater]

Awesome, had the same issue with and HDMI card myself...  Anyways, try using synaptic to re-install your alsa-mixer.  That hopefully will clear the intermittence and you'll have sound always!!

[GrandJu]

Hi all,

Soppel, I don't know how to deal with IRQ too, Maybe i will try to check because it seems to be an important stuff.
I checked your link but ,the part that interesting me, seems to not correspond to the files present on  AVLinux. example:
~$ cat /etc/conf.modules
cat: /etc/conf.modules: No such file or directory

Chkneater,
I don't want my NVidia to be blacklisted, this is the only one real soundcard I have For the moment it's enough for the weird small piece of music I do
Other "soundcards" detected by the system are my midi controllers. And I don't want them to be blacklisted too.

Otherwise, I tried to improve wath I did before. Updating alsa-base.conf.
I added two line to "# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0" like it is wrote in the comment above.

#added by me to select default card
options LPD8 index=-2
options nanoKONTROL index=-2
options NVidia index=0


It's not perfect, sometimes it fails but it seems to improve. I tried to reboot maybe 10 or 12 times and it only failed 2 times.

[chkneater]

I should have clarified, blacklist your ONBOARD chip!!!  If it's not already...

[soppel]

If the on-board chip was his problem he would be happy guy.
The on-board chip is easy to disable in the BIOS. ( most mainboards...) No blacklist necessary.

The problem is that Grandju's  MIDI controllers are regonized as soundcard........
So he can't blacklist anything.

[chkneater]

yeah, I did merp about the onboard chip being in the bios, also didn't notice soppel already advised that and it hadn't worked...  something just occured to me, I have two SC's and when I was using AV5 i had the prob he is having now, but I could fix it with alsamixer back then, now that I'm using AV6 the problem hasn't occurred since, could that be your prob GrandJu?