Re: [gentoo-user] Help getting my new loudspeakers working, please!

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Karl.

On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 09:00:12 +0100, karl@aspodata.se wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie:
> ...
> > Then I attempt to use alsamixer to unmute the speakers and, hopefully get
> > some sound out of them.  This is where my problems start.

> > alsamixer displays just one object, labelled S/PDIF in the middle of the
> > screen.  I don't have an S/PDIF connection, just an ordinary audio cable
> > with a green 3.5 mm jack plug at each end.
> ...

>  I have:
> # aplay --list-devices
> **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
> card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
>   Subdevices: 1/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]
>   Subdevices: 1/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: Generic Digital [Generic Digital]
>   Subdevices: 1/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 2: M1010LT [M Audio Delta 1010LT], device 0: ICE1712 multi [ICE1712 multi]
>   Subdevices: 0/1
>   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

> And if I do alsamixer -c 1 I also get just one s/pdif in the middle of
> the screen, the graphics card appearantly have one.

I got them working (sort of) in the end, I was just lacking a USB sound
driver.

Just a point, the documentation of all these commands is shockingly bad:
alsamixer critically depends on /etc/asound.conf, but doesn't even
mention it in its man page.  It would appear that /etc/asound.conf is
wholly undocumented anywhere.  aplay likewise just says what its options
do, without saying, for example, what form the "name" following -D has,
and what its semantics are.  Get this wrong and the half error message
you get is just "file not found".

Last night I booted up the Gentoo live CD, from around 6 months ago, to
see if that would give me a clue, via dmesg, what driver I was missing;
no, that didn't work, it just gave an error message for the sound.

> alsamixer -c 0 shows the motherboard interface,
> alsamizer -c 2 shows the pci one.

> Perhaps you have more than one interface.

Indeed, something comes out of the HDMI socket, too.  That was quite
troublesome when I was trying to debug things.

> ///

>  There is a debug tool /usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh if you install
> media-sound/alsa-utils

> You can possible get better help at linux-audio-user at
> lists.linuxaudio.org

linuxaudio.org didn't actually look too helpful - they're more into
helping people run music creation programs than configuring sound cards.

> Regards,
> /Karl Hammar

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).