Audio Configuration

The Linux Audio Users Guide http://www.djcj.org/LAU/guide/index.php

robin

As I understand it, OSS drivers were the original Linux sound drivers. Then the author decided to go commercial with them, only releasing occasional drivers that could be used for gpl purposes. (See http://www.opensound.com )

This and possibly a disagreement with the oss coding method prompted the Alsa group to start their own sound drivers. They are by no means a recent upstart, but they were not included in the kernel.org kernel source until the 2.6 series. Before this you had to download/apt-get them separately, compile, etc.

If you can't tell a difference in which drivers support your card better, I would go with Alsa. But that's just my preference. Maybe someone else can enlighten us and mention whether support for oss drivers will start dropping now that alsa is in the kernel.

Jacob S

ALSA seems to be the direction everyone's heading, from what I've observed.

ALSA has some nice features that make it a suitable substrate for all the Linux audio stuff.

It seems like most applications are written to use at least one of the major sound APIs:

The nice thing is that you can have ALSA be the software that directly controls your sound hardware, and still support all of those applications that use the above-listed APIs. That's because ALSA offers various compatibility wrappers / drivers for those other APIs.

AFAIK, ALSA is the only sound system list above that let programs written for any of the other four sound systems to work ok.

On the other hand, ALSA still seems fairly complex to me to set up. I.e., it's a heck of a lot more complicated than making this stuff work right on Windows (Now I'll don my asbestos pajamas ;)

It also seems to me that by far, ALSA has the widest sound card/chip support. When a new sound chip comes out, the only sound system I notice getting a driver for it is ALSA (and Windows :).

I suggest going with ALSA. At least then, you can be pretty confident that any problems you come across with program compatability can be worked out.

Christian Convey

I've got an Asus K8V SE Deluxe. The onboard soundcard is: lspci | grep -i audio 0000:00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60).

This seems to be the same as yours.

Looks a bit different from your setup. Anyway, my sound works fine with Sarge 2.6.8-2-386

Jonathan Kaye

Jonathan is using ALSA while the original poster is using OSS. I'd suggest to the original poster to use the ALSA modules (snd_via82xx, snd_pcm_oss, snd_mixer_oss) and take out the via82cxxx and via82cxxx_audio modules. Don't forget to use the alsamixer program to unmute the channels.

Colin

Make sure that the OSS driver is not in /etc/modules, and that you don't have any alias sound-slot-0 entry in /etc/modutils/*. Unload the OSS driver (or reboot), login at the command line, and run alsaconf (if you use discover, this is probably not necessary, it will load the driver automaticallc). Run alsamixer to adjust the volume. That should be all.

Andreas Janssen

Thank you very much, Andreas. Yes, that's all it takes to replace OSS with alsa. Just for the archive, here are all that I did:

then reboot. (I have discover1, in this case, running alsaconf will give me: No supported PnP or PCI card found.)

Thanks again Andreas!

T

The oss device is /dev/dsp. What are its permissions? What happens if you tell ogg123 to use the alsa playback method instead of the default (which seems to be oss)?

What is your xmms output plugin? If it's not alsa, try using that one.

try some of the other output plugins that mplayer -vo help provides. Check your .mplayer/config file, to see what you specify as the default.

Oh, and don't forget to check to make sure that the sound device isn't locked by a sound daemon, such as arts or esd. If it is, you have the option of either killing the sound daemon, or specifically using it. I believe xmms and mplayer have options for both, but I don't know about ogg123.

Justin Guerin

Given that you have the -oss modules loaded this is surprising. Perhaps the permissions on the device files are not set correctly.

Here are other things to try.

Reconfigure these programs to output to ALSA. E.g., in xmms, go to

and select "ALSA output plugin".

If you are running esd then you should select "eSound output plugin" here instead.

If this does not work for some reason then select "OSS Driver" and re-run OSS using the aoss program loader (in the alsa-oss package):

aoss emulates the OSS interface in a userspace library.

Thomas Hood

I am pretty new to debian (two months now since I ditched Mandrake) and I was able to do the switch thanks to the hardware detection that now really seems to work… Most everything works just fine and sarge is just as up-to date as I like it.

Nevertheless there are a few things which I would like to fix, the topmost being alsa instead of OSS.

I have just installed alsa (well I think I have). What I did was to:

apt-get alsa-base alsa-headers alsa-oss alsa-utils alsaplayer alsaplayer-alsa alsaplayer-common alsaplayer-gtk alsaplayer-oss

On my debian sarge with 2.6.7-1-686 Standard Kernel.

I don't know, I expected apt to ask me to remove oss or configure alsa, so that all apps use it instead of oss. But no questions were asked and alsa was installed without a hitch and without a question.

I tried xmms with the alsa output plugin: it didn't work. So then I ran alsaconf. Which has let me choose my soundcard and so I did. It then told me that alsa is ready to run. Nevertheless: xmms and alsaplayer play but no sound.

I googled a bit and found that you may have to do some more things like: add the following in /etc/modutils/aliases for my soundcard (it's an intel soundcard in an IBM Thinkpad t40p):

Wich I also did.

I rebooted (just to be on the save side) and started Gnome, I again tried to run XMMS with the alsa output plugin, but it didn't work. Nevertheless the OSS ouput plugin still works.

I did /etc/init.d/alsa start (and also reload and force-reload, but no option makes alsaplayer/XMMS work)

It doesn't work in kde nor Gnome apps. In KDE I can force it to use alsa as sound system in kcontrol, but only OSS works. In Gnome I don't even know where to start…

Probably I still have oss running and that prevents alsa from doing it's job, but I don't know how to go on from here: how do I disable OSS, how enable alsa properly? What is the right way to install alsa on debian anyway?

Pascal Bonesh

So the Libraries and Apps are installed.

OSS doesn't have any packages containing libs like ALSA. To use it, you only need the drivers from the kernel-image package. So there is nothing to uninstall, except maybe for output plugins of your applications.

There is no need to do that. First, if you use Kernel 2.6, you must make the changes to /etc/modprobe.d, not /etc/modutils. Second, the debian package management and alsaconf should take care of that. On my system I have:

The only thing I had to do was to add snd-emu10k1 to /etc/modules, because without it the init script for setting the default volume failed.

That probably means that the OSS driver module is loaded before the alsa module is loaded. That way ALSA can't work. You need to make sure that the OSS driver is not loaded. Check /etc/modules for the driver, and /etc/modprobe.d/* for entries like

where driver does /not/ begin with snd.

That will only reload the volume settings.

Andreas Janssen

You don't need alsa-headers unless you are a developer. You don't need alsa-oss unless you want to use ALSA's OSS compatibility drivers.

The alsaplayer* packages are rather irrelevant here; they are components of the ALSA music player and not of the ALSA drivers.

There are no OSS packages per se, although there are quite a few packages that are written to the OSS API. For these to work you need drivers that support that API — either the OSS drivers themselves or the ALSA OSS-compatibility drivers.

A common reason for ALSA seeming to fail to work after it is first installed is that all the output levels are set to zero. Install gamix and see if you can increase the levels above zero.

You are using Linux 2.6 so /etc/modutils/ is not used. The relevant directory for you is /etc/modprobe.d/ but you shouldn't need to put anything in there other than /etc/modprobe.d/alsa which is included in alsa-base.

Are you sure that the OSS drivers are not loaded? Check by running lsmod.

If the problem is that OSS modules are loading then you need to configure whatever is loading them so that they don't do that. Discover and hotplug are the usual culprits.

A quick hack is to move the OSS drivers out of /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/sound to some location where the module loader won't find them.

Thomas Hood

Hi Andreas and Thomas,

It seems something has loaded OSS before alsa, and removing the OSS drivers from their folder as suggested has worked… It was just a matter of alsa being set to volume zero and the wrong driver being loaded.

I've seen a number of people complaining about alsa not loading properly recently.

I too had that problem. OSS worked, but ALSA didn't.

After much searching and experimentation here is the solution:

ALSA will not load if OSS is alrady loaded.

If you are using a stock 2.6 kernel OSS and ALSA are both enabled, and OSS will try to load first.

There are two places to try to prevent this behavior without having to recompile your kernel with OSS disabled.

The first is /etc/hotplug/blacklist add a line with just the name of the OSS version of the sound driver module for your soundcard/chipset. (in my case, since mine is an AC97 compatible chipset it was "i810_audio")

The second is /etc/discover.conf add a skip line for your OSS module (in my case it was "skip i810_audio")

This should prevent the system from discovering it as well as prevent hotplug from loading it later in the bootup process.

Best of luck to all those who were having ALSA troubles.

Rod MacPherson

The package alsa-base comes with the file /etc/hotplug/blacklist.d/alsa-base I guess that if that file doesn't take care of your problems with getting hotplug to leave out OSS modules then you should bug report.

Ah, cool. I removed the discover package to get my ALSA working. This would have been a cleaner solution.

These two packages seem to overlap, don't they? Hotplug is pulled in due to udev and seems to do a bit of discovery, what is left for discover to do? (My system seems to work just fine with only hotplug + udev.) Will there be more magic is both are installed?

One other note. I recently had a problem with hotplug and ALSA, this was due to hotplug thinking that I needed the snd_usb_audio module inserted. I haven't got a clue why it all of a sudden started thinking that! Adding it to the blacklist took care of the problem.

Magnus Therning

I've tried this, at least in part, with no luck.

I'm not too big on rebooting my computer all the time, so I've unloaded all the ac97_codec and related modules (snd, sound, soundcore, i810_audio) for my system. I've installed the alsa-base and alsa-utils packages and have the /etc/hotplug/blacklist file in place.

I've run alsaconf and alsactl restore and they return: alsactl: load_state:1134: No soundcards found…

Even though the alsaconf script did find a valid sound card. alsactl: load_state:1134: No soundcards found…

lspci indicates (which is what alsa conf found as well) 0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 AC97 Audio Controler (MCP) (rev a1)

Nothing seems to load them up.

I can try rebooting when I get the chance, but that might be in a day or so… I don't like using the Windows approach on a Linux machine.

Well but this just avoided the issue. I was scratching my head few days ago too :-) My short story:

My solution: * remove /etc/modprobe.conf which was empty file

Somehow I had empty /etc/modprobe.conf which prevented hotplug/udev to read files in /etc/modprobe.d/ . See http://bugs.debian.org/271763

So now I have my system back :-)

he current alsaconf creates an empty /etc/modprobe.conf file. This bug is fixed in CVS.

Thomas Hood

The alsa-utils package has the alsamixer program.

Brendon Higgins

Try opening the XMMS preferences and at the bottom of the "Audio I/O Plugins" tab, where it says "Output Plugin", select "eSound Output Plugin".

ESD is using ALSA. ALSA is using /dev/dsp, so XMMS can't also use it directly. Tell XMMS to use ESD and then all your GNOME applications can share.

Jules Dubois

there's dmix plugin in alsa (for software mixing), see:

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin

Erik Steffl