[PlanetCCRMA] The el cheapo myth

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

ls /On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 20:03, Timo Sivula wrote:
> Hello Nando and all others.
> 
> ma, 2004-09-27 kello 06:31, Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano kirjoitti:
> > I assume that one card alone works fine, right?
>
> With the modules.conf made by alsaconf one card works fine, yes. I can
> see the midi inputs of all three cards but not the audio i/o:s of the
> other two.
> 
> With my own three-card modules.conf the computer goes mute. I have
> opened all channels using alsamixer but the machine still stays quiet.
> 
> > You don't need the snd-seq-oss aliases for the second and third cards,
> > there's only one sequencer for all of them. 
> > 
> > > alias sound-service-1-1 snd-seq-oss
> > > alias sound-service-1-3 snd-pcm-oss
> > > alias sound-service-1-8 snd-seq-oss
> > > alias sound-service-1-12 snd-pcm-oss
> 
> Should I remove the service-1-1 and 1-8 references to snd-se-oss later
> in the settings for the other cards?

Yes, although leaving them in should have make things worse. 

> > The modules.conf stuff looks fine to me. What happens when you start
> > alsa? 
> 
> [root at timo timo]# service alsasound restart
> Shutting down sound driversnd-mixer-oss: Device or resource busy
> snd-ens1370: Device or resource busy
> snd-pcm: Device or resource busy
> snd-timer: Device or resource busy
> snd-rawmidi: Device or resource busy
> snd-seq-device: Device or resource busy
> snd-ak4531-codec: Device or resource busy
> snd: Device or resource busy
>                                                            [  OK  ]
> ALSA driver already running
> Sound driver snd-ens1370 is already loaded
> Sound driver snd-ens1370 is already loaded
> Sound driver snd-ens1370 is already loaded
> [root at timo timo]#

Ok, so you are not really restarting alsa. Something is using the
devices and prevents them from being unloaded, and then you cannot start
things as the devices area already there. See if you have any program
using them. If nothing is using audio then probably something happened
at the kernel level (a kernel oops) that prevents the drivers from
working at all. Try:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound stop
(should not complain)
Make sure there are no audio modules running and then:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound start

I would try first with only two cards (comment out the third card in the
modules.conf file). 

> > If you don't have any errors
> > and the modules load fine, have you run alsamixer on all cards?
> > ("alsamixer -c 1" for the second, and so on and so forth). 
> 
> Did that for -c0 to -c2 and enabled the master volume and the pcm lines
> for all cards. Unfortunately no sound.

What do you see in /proc/asound/cards and /proc/asound/devices?
-- Fernando