Independent ALSA and linux audio support site

TroubleShooting

From the ALSA wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

Try playing sound

This troubleshooting is for ALSA problems. Many other software layers can be involved in Linux audio. Enter the aplay command in a terminal with -vv (extra-verbose) options to play a .wav file through ALSA. Your computer may have sample files in /usr/share/sound.

 aplay -vv /path/to/file.wav

If that produces sound then your sound problems may lie in another package or software layer.

If aplay doesn't produce sound, then use aplay -L to list all soundcards and digital audio devices. If this lists other devices, you can try playing sound through each in turn using its full name using aplay's -D option (for example aplay -vv -D front:CARD=Audigy2,DEV=0 /path/to/file.wav).

Another useful command-line utility in the alsa-utils package is speaker-test. The command

 speaker-test -c 2 -t wav

will play sound through each of two channels (normally front left and front right) in turn.

Troubleshooting ALSA Problems

An important first step: compile the relevant information using aadebug. Also have a look at FAQ, ALSA modules and Sound cards for troubleshooting your specific module or soundcard. AlsaTips might have useful stuff too. ALSA TroubleShooting PDF by Takashi is an offsite troubleshooting presentation given by one of the core alsa developers.

There are 2 common user-based mailing-lists:

and 2 important developer mailing lists:

Check that the ALSA drivers are compiled as modules

Make sure you have installed ALSA as modules, and not compiled into the kernel. ALSA fails for all sorts of reasons when compiled into the kernel (this may no longer be true for kernels after v2.6.5*). Anything that mentions sound in the kernel config, even if it is not directly to do with ALSA, set its option to M if you can. If you compile your own kernel: when you configure the kernel, make sure you see M (for module) and not * (compiled into the kernel).

Check the ALSA driver version

Look at /proc/asound/version and that this says something like:

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.4.

and that the version is 1.0.4 or above. If it is not, download and compile newer drivers for kernel v2.4, or update your v2.6 kernel to version v2.6.5 or later. Check the Quick Install instructions or the other installation instructions on the main page of this Wiki for additional information.

Check the ALSA library version

How to check your ALSA library version is distribution dependent. Usually, you can use the package (e.g. RPM or DPKG) or dependency manager (e.g. APT, aptitude, synaptic, yum, up2date, YAST2) used by your distribution to check the versions of installed packages. You can also try something like;

grep VERSION_STR /usr/include/alsa/version.h

and check that the version is at least 1.0.4, and usually it is best if it matches the driver version. Check the Quick Install instructions or the other installation instructions on the main page of this Wiki for additional information.

Check the sound drivers for your card are active

First check that the ALSA drivers are installed and have recognized your card. Make sure that /proc/asound/cards lists your card, as card number zero. If not, make sure that the appropriate driver module is loaded. To figure out which modules you need, use the lspci | egrep -i audio command. This usually will list the name and type of your sound chipset. The main ALSA website then contains a list of those chipsets and the required drivers.

As a wild guess, for most recent low-cost AC97 based motherboards and laptops, try the snd-intel8x0 driver. To make sure your card is recognized and the right driver is selected you can also try the alsaconf command, and use it to configure your sound card. It can also be that the ALSA driver has not been loaded but an OSS driver has been loaded. Check the contents of /dev/sndstat (or /proc/asound/oss/sndstat) and if you see your card listed there, and there is no ALSA emulation line, it is being driven by an OSS driver. Unload it and load the ALSA driver.

If you have multiple sound cards, see the MultipleCards and .asoundrc pages to discover how to configure ALSA to renumber them if the cards are not in the order you would like them to be.

Check that you have the right sound devices

Run alsamixer as root. If you get

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

the right device special files in /dev/ might be missing. Run ls /dev/snd/ and make sure there are several entries there. If the directory does not exist, or it is empty, use the ALSA snddevices script or similar to create it and the device special files in it.

Also verify that the global config file /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf is present and readable. It may be a link to /etc/alsa/alsa.conf

Check that non-root users can access the sound device special files

Run alsamixer both as root and as a non-root ordinary user. If the latter fails, the permissions on the device special files don't allow access by ordinary users. There are several options to fix this, depending on security requirements, your distribution and how your PC is set up:

Check that the sound card mixer channels are unmuted

If your card's driver is installed and its name appears in /proc/asound/cards, and you still hear no sound, the most likely cause is that you haven't unmuted the right mixer channels and set their volume to nonzero. Note that ALSA sort of misnames the channels of the mixers of many cards. Use alsamixer to play around with the settings of the most obvious sounding channels. ALSA modules and Sound cards may describe what the channels for a specific sound card. Usually, make sure that the at least the Master and PCM (and Wave or Headphone if present) channels are unmuted and have non zero volume. For laptop users, try toggling the External Amplifier switch.

The main channels are unmuted and non zero volume, but not sound

Many cards can do both analog and digital (labeled SPDIF/IEC958) output, but some cannot do both at the same time. If you hear no sound, it may be because the card is in analog mode and you have digital speakers or viceversa. To determine which mixer channels controls the switch between analog and digital for your card look at the ALSA modules and Sound cards pages for your module/card. Often this is called Analog/Digital Output Jack. If present, mute/unmute it to switch between digital and analog sound output.

Check whether your application uses OSS instead of ALSA

If you still hear no sound, your application may be set up to use OSS. Check with your application's preferences to see if this is the case. Also check whether other applications are blocking ALSA, by running (whilst ideally playing sound in them):

fuser -v /dev/snd/* /dev/dsp*

/dev/snd/* is ALSA, but /dev/dsp* is OSS (or rather, ALSA's emulation of OSS - OssEmulation - which unfortunately has the side-effect of disabling Dmix).

The best fix is to set your application up to use ALSA instead of OSS. If your application does not support ALSA, there are three possible solutions:

It is also possible that your application is set up to use the API used in the ALSA 0.5.x driver series. In that case switch the application to use the new API, which is often called the ALSA 0.9.x API or the ALSA 1.x API. You can also set the default for applications that use libao (for example mpg321 and mpg123 by putting the line

default_driver=alsa09

in /etc/libao.conf and for applications that use OpenAL the line

(define devices '(alsa))

in the file /etc/openalrc or ~/.openalrc. OssEmulation provides details on OSS emulation.

Sound can be heard but it is distorted

Compile problem when doing make with alsa-lib with kernel 2.6.7

If during compilation you get asm-generic/error.h File not found errors, and then cards.lo Error 1, go to your kernel source tree and copy the files in linux-2.6.x/include/asm-generic" to /usr/include/asm-generic/ and it should work. This is usually however a very bad thing to do, and you should try instead to fix your library building process.

When loading modules, it complains of unknown symbols.

As root, type "lsmod". Look at the "Used by" column. If it has all "-", this is bad. It should look more like the second output. This is not an ALSA problem. Unluckily, I don't know how to fix this problem yet. (try modprobe \<modulename> on newer kernels to load the module and modprobe -r \<modulename> to unload it. kill any sound servers (e.g. artsd) before attempting to unload)

Bad output:

Module                  Size  Used by
nvram                   9036  - 
snd_mixer_oss          19524  - 
ipt_LOG                 6340  - 
ipt_state               1956  - 
ip_conntrack           35328  - 
iptable_filter          2692  - 
ip_tables              16672  - 
lp                     10724  - 
parport                40776  - 
apm                    18032  - 
uhci_hcd               32692  - 
usbcore                81504  - 
snd                    54180  - 
soundcore               9440  - 
snd_page_alloc         11596  - 
intel_agp              19712  - 
agpgart                33640  - 
evdev                   9216  - 
prism54                57212  - 
firmware_class          9572  - 
yenta_socket           21316  - 
eepro100               30032  - 
mii                     4900  -

Good Output:

Module                  Size  Used by
snd_pcm_oss            54184  0
snd_mixer_oss          20864  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_audigyls           28456  0
snd_emu10k1           105352  0
snd_rawmidi            26532  1 snd_emu10k1
snd_pcm                97796  3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_audigyls,snd_emu10k1
snd_timer              28932  1 snd_pcm
snd_seq_device          8584  2 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec         71632  2 snd_audigyls,snd_emu10k1
snd_page_alloc          9992  3 snd_audigyls,snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_util_mem            4480  1 snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep              10628  1 snd_emu10k1
snd                    56420  11 snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_audigyls,snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_seq_device,snd_ac97_codec,snd_util_mem,snd_hwdep
soundcore               8288  1 snd
nvidia               4818804  12
md5                     4096  1
ipv6                  262180  12
ide_cd                 36896  0
cdrom                  35228  1 ide_cd
lp                      8936  0
parport                36936  1 lp
usbhid                 23680  0
uhci_hcd               30224  0
usbcore               107876  4 usbhid,uhci_hcd
e1000                  79108  0

One possible fix: Check to make sure that the kernel that is currently running is the one against which the modules were compiled. You may have compiled a new kernel and not installed it, or made a mistake in your bootloader configuration.

Kernel modules load correctly but you get error: Inappropriate ioctl for device

If you run Gentoo or any other source-based distro, please make sure the only CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS used are -O1 (or -O0), -march, -pipe and -fomit-frame-pointer if necessary. -freorder-blocks and -malign-doubles should never be activated. Should get you some errors such as

ALSA sound/core/control.c:1105: unknown ioctl = 0xc2c85512
ALSA sound/core/control.c:1105: unknown ioctl = 0xc2c85512

Kernel-2.6.17.8 and VT82C686 AC97: "No such device"

Problem: kernel-2.6.17.8 with builtin alsa driver from version 1.0.11rc4 provokes a "No such device" message with the following hardware:

Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] (rev 03)
Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)

Solution: As I was just upgrading the linux kernel from 2.6.10 to 2.6.17.8 I already had a working alsa setup. The kernel configuration of my whole sound subsystem was modular. Therefore neither a recompilation of the kernel nor a reboot was required. The only thing I had to do was:

Upgrading alsa-driver to alsa-driver-1.0.12rc3:

./configure --with-debug=full --with-cards=via82xx

make -s
make install

Now I removed all the old and faulty modules and replaced them by loading the new modules as usual. Then as usual:

alsaconf
alsamixer

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

With kernel-2.6.19 and 2.6.19.1 the hints given above do not help. The alsa-driver delivered with those kernels is simply not sufficient:

Cf. linux-2.6.19.1/include/sound/version.h 

#define CONFIG_SND_VERSION "1.0.13"

The whole driver has to be upgraded to alsa-driver-1.0.14rc1. For me this was the only way to avoid the error message "No such device".

hda-intel: no codecs found!

The error message "hda-intel: no codecs found!" can be experienced, when the snd-hda-intel module fails to find the codec chip of your sound device. This may for example happen if your PCIe 1x sound card is in the wrong slot. For example on ASUS P5E mainboards, the supplied sound card is supposed to be inserted in the top most PCIe 1x slot. This is the brown slot on the P5E.

Retrieved from "http://alsa.opensrc.org/TroubleShooting"

Category: Troubleshooting

GITHUB | EDIT