Sound card problems - ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller

[vinay.v]

Hi,

I have a Foxconn motherboard with inbuilt sound card. The "lspci -v" command shows my sound card to be "ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller".
Although this sound card is listed as supported in ALSA homepage, I haven't been able to make it work on any linux distribution (not just Ubuntu).

Ubuntu recognises my sound card & loads the proper "snd-atiixp" driver for it.
But, "aplay -l" says no soundcards found. "lspci -v" shows my soundcard. "lsmod" indicates that snd-atiixp driver is loaded. Even if I do a "modprobe snd-atiixp", I still don't get the sound.

Most of the posts in different online forums for my sound card suggest that tuning the alsamixer (turning off external amplifier to be exact) solves issues for most people. But when I run the "alsamixer" command, I get an error saying "alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device". I cannot open any mixer for that matter alsamixer, amixer, kmix, etc. If I try to do anything related to sound, it says soundcard not found or not configured.

I did download the latest alsa drivers from the alsa website & compiled them as per instructions for my specific sound card. But the problem remains the same. One thing I noted was that almost all linux distributions were able to recognise my sound card properly & load the correct snd-atiixp driver, but there is always no sound. I can't open the mixer in any of them (Same error as above).

When Ubuntu booted up, one strange thing I noticed was that I got an error stating -
"AC'97 2 access is not valid [0xffffffff], removing mixer."
I think this is the reason why sound doesn't work even if the proper (snd-atiixp) driver is loaded.

Another error I notice during booting up is "PCI: unable to allocate resource area 3" or something like that. I don't know whether that has something to do with sound.

My computer configuration - Pentium D 2.8 GHz Dualcore processor, FoxConn motherboard with built in ATI IXP SB400 AC'97 sound card, built in LAN port, etc., 512 MB DDR2 RAM, 256MB nVidia GeForce 6600 graphics card.

Just FYI, I bought this computer a week ago. I didn't want to install windoze on it. But I did install it (for a couple of minutes only) & tested that sound works properly on windoze after installing the drivers from the motherboard CD.

Any help to get the sound card working on linux would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Vinay V

[ephraim]

Hey,

I have the same sound card and had problems for the last couple months. Tried just about everything. However, only two things have solved it for me, but I'm still a newbie and don't know much so this may be absolutely worthless to you.

One of my problems was that the snd-atiixp-modem was loading with the snd-atiixp and crowding it out. I don't understand the nitty gritty of this totally, but it appears that the modem and sound card are on the same chip and they don't co-exist very well with Alsa. So, my solution was to blacklist the modem so that it simply doesn't enter into the mix. I don't use the modem anyway.

To do this, open up terminal.

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

at bottom of list, type...

#get rid of snd-atiixp-modem
snd-atiixp-modem

then save.


However, I also had to do the following little tweak, excerpted from the following webpage....

http://www.beginningubuntu.com/dappe...weird_notebook

"My notebook is possibly the most Linux-incompatible machine that's ever been made. Here's a tip: Don't buy an Asus A6R. It's one of the worst notebooks I've ever owned.
Sound didn't work straight off. The notebook has an IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller, according to Ubuntu's Device Manager. If you've got the same sound card, and want to get it working, you need to do two things.
(1) Double-click the speaker icon in Ubuntu's system tray and click Edit -> Preferences in the Volume Control window that appears. In the list, look for the Master Surround entry, and put a checkbox in it. Then look for External Amplifier and put a check in it. Click the Close button then click the Switches tab in the Volume Control window. Remove the check against External Amplifier.
(2) Then click the Playback tab and click the Speaker icon beneath the Master Surround slider, so that it's no longer muted. Then adjust the slider. Playback some audio and you should find everything now works. Basically, the Master Surround slider is now your volume slider. Weird, but true. To make the system tray applet use the Master Surround to control the volume, right-click the system tray speaker icon, select Preferences, and select Master Surround in the list. "


And so now I have sound. I hope it helps you as well.

Best wishes,
Ephraim

[vinay.v]

First of all, thank you Ephraim for taking time to reply to my post & trying to help me.

I did try blacklisting the "snd-atiixp-modem" module. But that still doesn't solve the problem. The scenario isn't changed one bit!
Even after blacklisting the modem module, the aplay -l says "aplay: device_list:222: no soundcards found...".
Even though lspci lists my sound card correctly & the lsmod command shows me that snd-atiixp driver for my sound card is loaded, the system doesn't even recognise the existance of sound card. For e.g. alsamixer command results in "alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device". Trying to open the volume control from the task bar results in "No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found".

I have ordered for an additional sound card. It's a Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 Live PCI card. I did research a little bit in a few linux forums to find out that this card works out of the box for most linux distributions. Hopefully that will help me get sound out of my computer (the issue with my on-board sound card will still not be solved though).

[Peter Grant]

Thankyou Ephraim!! Fantastic!! I followed all that you suggested and my Asus A6R laptop now has sound. I had just today tried Mandriva Spring and it also had no sound. This may be a fix for a general problem.

[BinaryMadman]

Ephraim, you rock! This worked for me as well. I was having problems with getting audio to work with Flash, in general really - and this fixed it!

[andy_6590]

I followed these instructions.

"(1) Double-click the speaker icon in Ubuntu's system tray and click Edit -> Preferences in the Volume Control window that appears. In the list, look for the Master Surround entry, and put a checkbox in it. Then look for External Amplifier and put a check in it. Click the Close button then click the Switches tab in the Volume Control window. Remove the check against External Amplifier.
(2) Then click the Playback tab and click the Speaker icon beneath the Master Surround slider, so that it's no longer muted. Then adjust the slider. Playback some audio and you should find everything now works. Basically, the Master Surround slider is now your volume slider. Weird, but true. To make the system tray applet use the Master Surround to control the volume, right-click the system tray speaker icon, select Preferences, and select Master Surround in the list. "

But I went into System> Preferences> Sound, because it wouldn't let me double click like in the instructions. I got a window open with 3 Tabs Devices, Sounds and System beep. I can't find the Master Surround entry. but all the playbacks are set to Autodetect and the sound capture is ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. I tried to test them but it just closed the window and did nothing.

Thanks.

Visit my other thread for information.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=521226

[BinaryMadman]

I forgot to mention in the earlier post that the fix only worked more reliably when I entered:

#get rid of snd-atiixp-modem
blacklist snd-atiixp-modem

rather than just:

#get rid of snd-atiixp-modem
snd-atiixp-modem

[sheds]

Hey there guys.

I've been following these instructions to solve my sound card problem. I am not seeing the sound card anywhere.

Just got a quick question here: do i have to perform something else after putting the entry in the blacklist? You know like modprobe or restart the machine?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[jargoman]

yes you would have to reboot once you blacklisted a module. Or you could remove the module with

$ sudo rmmod snd-atiixp-modem

I would recommend rebooting anyway just to be sure.

[sheds]

Ok, i restated the computer, but got the same problem.

Nonetheless, i followed an manual to get sound going in ubuntu, my case, kubuntu.

I first killed ESD with killall esd, but no processes where running with esd.

The lsof /dev/dsp and lsof /dev/snd/* gave no output, so that's fine.

I then tweaked /etc/esound/esd.conf as the manual suggested.

[esd]
auto_spawn=1
spawn_options=-terminate -nobeeps -as 2 -d default
spawn_wait_ms=100
# default options are used in spawned and non-spawned mode
default_options=

I still get no sound. So, after performing all these steps, i believe my problem is that there is no sound card detected. The manual suggests that when posting for help on the forums, i should include the output of the command 'lsmod | grep snd':

snd_atiixp             19852  0
snd_ac97_codec         96672  1 snd_atiixp
snd_ac97_bus            2432  1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm_oss            46080  0
snd_mixer_oss          18560  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                80520  3 snd_atiixp,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              23172  1 snd_pcm
snd                    55428  6 snd_atiixp,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore               9952  1 snd
snd_page_alloc         10504  2 snd_atiixp,snd_pcm

Hope that someone can help me out and that the preceding information is enough. I will gladly post some more information that you require.

Thanks in advance for the help.