[PlanetCCRMA] No sound whatsoever...

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 20:32 +0100, christopher melen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running planetccrma on a Dell Optiplex GX100. I
> have no internet connection on this machine, so
> installed using the pre-prepared disks located at -
> 
> ftp://ccrma.stanford.edu/pub/planetccrma/3/
> 
> Although my soundcard worked perfectly during the
> initial installation test, I now have no sound
> whatsoever. My soundcard spec -
> 
> VENDOR: Ensoniq
> MODEL: ES1371 [AudioPC1-97]
> MODULE = snd-ens 137
> 
> Although I am a relative newbie, both to Linux and
> such things as alsa and jack, I'm pretty sure it's not
> a trivial configuration issue; possibly a kernel
> module problem?

What do you see when you do:
  cat /proc/asound/cards
  cat /proc/asound/devices
(from a terminal)

You should see your soundcard and its audio and midi devices. If you
don't then ALSA is not running. 

You should also start a mixer app and make sure the channels are not
muted and the levels are raised. I usually use either Gamix or alsamixer
from a terminal. 

> Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that when I test the
> soundcard now the test freezes (with no sound,
> obviously), and I have to force quit.

How are you testing and what do you force quit?

It could be that an application is already using the audio device and
the app you are using to test blocks (waiting for the device to be
freed). Check to see if something like "arts" or "esd" is running, you
can search for this by doing:
  ps axuw|grep arts
  ps axuw|grep esd

Those are the "sound daemons" for the desktop which you should perhaps
disable (if that's the problem). 

> Hope someone can shed some light on this!

-- Fernando