A Dual Sound Card Setup

kwong — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:15:07 +0000

Newer sound card usually does not come with a game port since most of the peripherals nowadays come almost exclusively with USB connections.Since I have an old MIDI keyboard (MK-4903) and the only way it can connect to a computer is via the game port, I could not use it on my either of my Linux workstations (1, 2) at home. My main working station uses an ASUS P5E motherboard, which uses an add-on PCI Express sound card and the other Linux box uses an ASUS P5QL Pro motherboard with integrated sound. In theory, I could just disable the default sound on either of the machines and use a game port equipped sound card instead. But the only spare sound card I have is a SoundBlaster Live value card which does not offer much beyond the basics, so I decided to try adding it as a second sound card to my main computer.

Ubuntu 8.04 recognized the second sound card with no problem. A cat /dev/sndstat confirmed that both sound cards are indeed installed:

Card config:
HDA Intel at 0xf9ff8000 irq 22
SBLive! Value [CT4780] (rev.7, serial:0×80221102) at 0xe880, irq 18

And lsmod | grep snd showed that midi modules were successfully loaded:

snd_rtctimer, snd_emux_synth, snd_seq_virmidi, snd_emu10k1, snd_ac97_codec, snd_seq_dummy, snd_seq_oss, snd_hda_intel, snd_pcm_oss, snd_mixer_oss, snd_pcm, snd_rawmidi, snd_hwdep, snd_seq, snd_timer, snd_seq_device

So the dual sound card setup is pretty effortless. Getting the MIDI keyboard setup correctly though turned out to be quite tricky and I will share my experience in a later post.

ASUS P5QL Pro Audio Configuration in Ubuntu 8.10 (64 Bit)

kwong — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:11:25 +0000

After building the new quad core PC, I realized that the sound was not working (at first, I did not pay much attention to sound since this new build is used mainly as a headless node).The motherboard I am using is an ASUS P5QL Pro. At the time of purchase, my primary goal was to choose a cheap yet power efficient board and thus I decided on this P43 ASUS board. Since Intel’s P43 chipset is relatively new, I realized that the hardware support might be some issue (for instance, the onboard gigabit LAN support was just added in Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit).

According to Asus’s documentation, the audio for P5QL Pro is Reltek ALC1200 8-Channel High-Definition Audio. The controller is showing as an Intel 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller and bares a device ID of 82fe:

But running amixer in console does not yield any sound devices. After searching the Internet, I found this article: basically, adding

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=1

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. I was able to see the device output from amixer command. And sudo lshw -C sound shows that I have the following:

description: Audio device
product: 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 1b
bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 module=snd_hda_intel

But I still was not able to use the sound control within the Gnome session. The sound icon was shown as disabled and clicking on it resulted in a "no volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found" error. After further research, I realized that the user I logged in as does not belong to the group audio (note, this is due to the fact audio was not recognized during installation). So I added the user to the audio group:

usermod -a -G audio

And after that, the audio button became functional.

For whatever reason, the device is showing as HDA Intel ALC 888 in Sound Preferences. And there are many devices to choose from:

It seems that leaving the options as auto detect does not work. I manually set the Sound Events, Music and Movies and Audio Conferencing to use HDA Intel ALC888 Analog (OSS) and set the Default Mixer Tracks to use Realtek ALC888 (OSS Mixer) and everything seemed to finally work.

The ALSA version that comes with Ubuntu 8.10 is 1.0.17a, the source from http://www.alsa-project.org/ does not include patches for 2.6.27-7-generic kernel so I was not able to compile the source. I guess that as an alternative, you can try downloading the latest driver source (right now is 1.0.18a) and it should work in Ubuntu 8.10 (I have compiled it successfully).

Here are some useful links:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gutsy_Intel_HD_Audio_Controller

http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Quick_Install

http://www.alsa-project.org/~valentyn/Alsa-sound-mini-HOWTO-7.html

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+question/49666

Kerry D. Wong » ASUS P5QL Pro

A Dual Sound Card Setup

ASUS P5QL Pro Audio Configuration in Ubuntu 8.10 (64 Bit)