Sound Problem

[Mark Eggers]

A couple of things about your sound problem . . . although I'm running a
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card, so you may have some differences.

ALSA is not only zero volume by default, all channels are also MUTED by
default.  This means that however loudly you turn up the volume (aRTs,
mixers, external controls) you will not hear anything.

Start up either alsamixer (a curses interface mixer) or gnome-alsamixer
and make sure that each channel is UNMUTED.

In KDE if you are using aRTs, make sure under hardware you've selected
ALSA.  Autodetect should work, but I have not tried it.

I don't use aRTs, but set my notifications to work with an external
player.  See my other messages about this configuration.

Finally, there are some programs that won't work with ALSA.  CrossOver
Office is one of those.  What you have to do is use the ALSA-OSS
emulation interface to get those to work.

Since I install my own ALSA stuff, I'm not sure if you'll need alsa-oss
or not (or if that package is available).  I've downloaded it from the
ALSA project home page (http://www.alsa-project.org/), built it, and
installed it.  If you do this, make sure you get the correct version
(Fedora Core 2 is currently at 1.0.3), and get the alsa-dev package as
well.  I just build the entire ALSA suite which is currently at 1.0.5.

Then you'll need to mangle your /etc/modprobe.conf to enable OSS
emulation for those programs that need it.  Here's an example:

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
#
# replace snd-cs46xx with your sound card
#
alias snd-card-0 snd-cs46xx
#
# only add options your sound card supports - see the
# ALSA home page for information
#
options snd-cs46xx id=tbeach mmap_valid=1

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

#
# card #1 - yes, card #1 is 0 - the good old arrays
# start at 0 thing
#
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

The above works with my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.  Your sound
service devices might be different for the Audigy.  Please check the
ALSA project home page for that information.

I am currently running XMMS with the KDE control panel applet (with MP3,
Vorbis Ogg, etc. support), KDE notification via aplay, Kaffine, MPlayer,
and a host of other stuff with no problem.

My next projects are to get Jack running on Fedora Core 2 (some latency
issues are being discussed on the jack mailing list), and getting access
to my Yamaha XG50 midi daughter card via the ALSA driver.

In short:

1) Make sure your channels are not muted.  This is the ALSA default
2) Add the appropriate OSS section in modprobe.conf for ALSA-challenged 
   software

/mde/
just my two cents . . . .