Linux Format forums

[MGE]

Howdy all

I am stuck on a weird problem, that I just can't wrap my head round.
Here's what happened:
Background:
Before this problem started, I had been playing with Wine's settings to get Ventrillio to work, and recognise the Wine mixer.
I had to change Wine to OSS, and then in KDE Control Center > Sound & Multimedia > Sound System > General tab - Unticked "Enable the sound system" to release the mixer, and then under the hardware tab, selected ALSA.
When I did this, Ventrillio could see the sound mixer info and allowed me to configure it.
Before, I could only select the soundcard itself and not the mixer and source, etc.

Anyway, I was running World of Warcraft and Ventrillio with Wine, whilst listening to some choons through Amarok.
Everything was going fine, although I did notice that there was a slight crackle every now and then when Amarok changed tracks.
(Before Ventrillio, No crackle at all, as far as I can remember anyway)

At the time, I didn't think anything of it, as I was listening to some pretty chilled out tracks from Orbital, so thought it was maybe part of the track.
Then whilst in game, in WoW, a rogue ganked me, and I heard a rather large crackle from the speakers again, and then Silence. :shock
No sound in WoW, so I quit the game, and then noticed Amarok was still playing away and no sound at all!
Rebooted, and still no sound.

I tried alsaconf, and that brought the sound back until I played anything with Amarok, and then the sound would disappear.
This time though, alsaconf would not bring the sound back.
alsaconf could see the card, and configured it automatically, but again, no sound.
So I checked to make sure the sound hadn't been muted in kMix and alsamixer, and all was ok, but I still have no sound. I then changed the sound system settings back to their original settings before I had messed about.
Rebooted afterwards just to make sure, and still no sound.

So, after about an hour of rebooting, changing settings, searching for similar problems etc, I gave up and reinstalled Mepis.
When I logged in on the LiveCD, I had sound. When I rebooted, No Sound

Does anyone have any idea whats gone wrong?

Heres some system info:

[grumpy@home]

Hi MGE.

I have an Abit IC7.

It has onboard sound (AC97 codec) Intel hardware. Alsaconf should show an Intel card & should select the alsa
snd-intel8x0 module to drive it.
Your aplay output shows a Soundblaster Live, card detected

Have you added a sound blaster card? Is this the one your trying to configure, or are you trying to configure the onboard sound.?
If you have added anthr sound card, did you trn the onboard sound off in the bios?



Cheers

[MGE]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

The on-board AC97 was disabled in the BIOS the day I bought the motherboard all those years ago as I have a Soundblaster live card, needed because of the extra sockets as my PC is the beating heart of my home AV system.
The Soundblaster card is the one that has been in use ever since, until last night when the mystery sound issues occurred. Never had a single issue with this card, excellent sound quality, works well with my HiFi setup, and LOUD

I needed a soundcard that had a hardware mixer for games and VoIP software like Teamspeak and Ventrillio.
Most AC97's couldn't handle a game and a VoIP Program at the time very well, which resulted in white noise being broadcast down the channel when keyed up, and rebooting would only solve it. (Windows user at the time)

I know its not a hardware issue, if I boot into the LiveCD - I have sound, but no sound when booting from the hard disk.
It has to be something that resides on the /home partition that's causing this, as I formatted the / partition during the last install.

I have tried creating a new user, but no sound in there either.
I made sure both mine, and the test user were part of the audio group.

This is a really annoying problem.
_________________
Pentium 4 3.2Ghz Prescott 1MB Cache
Abit IC7 (875P Chipset)
3GB Corsair Dual Channel DDR
Nvidia GeForce 6600GT
500GB (SATA2-ReiserFS) Main drive
500GB (PATA-ReiserFS) Media drive
120GB (PATA-NTFS) Legacy data
OS: SimplyMEPIS 8