Re: Questions about sis7012+snd_intel8x0 sound card problem

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To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:14:31 +0900

On Sunday 10 July 2005 13:01, Trace Green wrote:
> Hi, all
>
> My sound card is SiS7012 integrated, vendor and
> device id is 1039:7012. I tried to use alsaconf to
> config my sound card, it loads snd_intel8x0.
>
> But i cann't hear any sound, when i use alsamixer to
> check, i find pcm and master channel is just 0, i
> can't change the value of them. of course, it is not
> muted.
>
> This seems an old problem, i tried to find the answer
> in google, fail....
>
> Anyideas?

amixer (the mixer problem for ALSA) should "just
work" (TM)

But if it's not, I do have a few ideas.

It's possible you are successfully setting the volume of
some part of the card, but not of the part of your card
you think you are. Some cards driven by the
snd-intel8x0 driver have a "quirk" which means that the
surround volume control and the master volume control
(if you have surround sound) or the headphone volume
and the master volume control, are swapped. I'm not
totally sure of the details but my reading of the
documentation suggests the _pins are wired into the
board the wrong way round (!!!!)_ on some boards... The
driver claims to be able to detect this in some cases
and compensate for it -- but my board, which is
different to yours, is an example of one it doesn't.

Try using amixer to unmute and set the volume of your
card (you may possibly have to be root to do this, I
don't on my machine but I'm not sure if that's
universal).

amixer set Headphone 50 unmute

This will unmute the Headphone setting and
simultaneously set the volume to 50 (either 50 on a
scale of 1 to something or 50%, not sure what controls
which it does, either way 50 should be audible).

If you don't have amixer on your machine, apt-get
alsa-utils first then you will.

Then you can use aplay <sound file> to check your sound
is working. amixer set Master 50 should also set master
volume, amixer set pcm 100 to set PCM to 100% (then
control actual volume with either Master or Headphone
setting)

One caveat -- I'm not sure if the settings are
driver-dependent or card-dependent. My money is on
driver-dependent but I've been wrong before (back in
2002 sometime I think... just kidding). Anyway,
amixer's "set" commands are CASE SENSITIVE so first do:

amixer | grep 'Simple mixer'

and that'll give you a list of mixer settings you can
change. Then be sure to use the setting EXACTLY AS IT
APPEARS. For example my master volume is 'Master' so I
can change my volume with:

amixer set Master 50

for example. Actually I use amixer set Headphone 50
since my card has the Headphone / Master Swapped
problem and I haven't fixed it yet.

Headphone will probably be muted unless you've unmuted
it. Actually, on my board ALL the settings using ALSA
were muted until I unmuted them -- even though I'd been
successfully playing sounds using OSS under a 2.4
kernel until I upgraded to 2.6 and ALSA.

Summary:

Make sure you are using amixer
Make sure you really have unmuted the mixer settings --
it says off if muted and on if not.
use amixer set <Master|Headphone|pcm> <number> <mute|
unmute> to change settings
Test with aplay
Consider the possibility that your Headphone and Master
settings are swapped if none of the above solves your
problem.

The driver claims it can be forced to swap settings so
Master does what it says it does using module options,
but I haven't got that working yet.

(Info about the "quirk" involving master / headphone
swap came from <kernel source
dir>/Documentation/sound/ALSA Configuration.txt --
search that file for the word intel.

Mark

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• Previous message: David Clymer: "Re: Sarge, IBM xSeries 346 Ultra320 Hot-Swap HardDisk"
• In reply to: Trace Green: "Questions about sis7012+snd_intel8x0 sound card problem"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]