[AuckLUG] Sound problem

[Darius Powell]

Kent Wilkinson <kent_wilkinson at xtra.co.nz> writes:

> Hi all, I have a problem with my sound, it's not working :-(
> I was playing around with the sound settings in gxine and have lost all
> sound period! The reason I was playing around with the sound settings is
> that I was getting all the background sound from xine but not the
> voices, but I did get voices in mplayer. It should be noted that gxine
> worked fine before.
>
> My setup is as follows:
>
> nForce4 motherboard, with on board ac97 sound which is output via
> toslink to my home theatre, this has worked great in the past. I have
> tried changing from the optical connection to the analog front speaker
> output on the back of the motherboard still no sound, I have tried
> setting all options with alsamixer, up down on off etc... still no joy.I
> have tried all of the 3 toslink and several different analog inputs on
> my home theatre, which still plays fine from dvd via toslink so I don't
> think it is the home theatre. I still get light from the optical cable
> from the PC as well.
>
> Is my sound card dead ???
>
> My OS is Gentoo amd64 kernel version 2.6.20-gentoo-r7 using alsa from
> the kernel source.
>
> Any advice welcome

See if this helps:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Dolby_Digital_Out_(AC3,_SPDIF)


My setup is similar, gentoo amd64 asus mainboard with ac97 using
optical cable to sound system.

My ALSA is set to SPDIF by default with (I tried the main system wide
setting but didn't work, per user setting works):

dariusp at dilbert:~$ cat ~/.asoundrc
pcm.!default spdif


My mplayer config:

dariusp at dilbert:~$ cat .mplayer/config
# Write your default config options here!

ac = hwac3,hwdts,


My xine config:

<snip lots of options>
# speaker arrangement
# { Mono 1.0  Stereo 2.0  Headphones 2.0  Stereo 2.1  Surround 3.0  Surround 4.0  Surround 4.1  Surround 5.0  Surround 5.1  Surround 6.0  Surround 6.1  Surround 7.1  Pass Through }, default: 1
audio.output.speaker_arrangement:Pass Through
<snip lots of options>


If that doesn't help there are a number of gentoo wiki HOWTOs
concerning ALSA and surround sound.  However it sounds like yours was
working previously, so maybe you just lost your config for xine or
mplayer?

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Index:HOWTO#Sound

-- 
Darius Powell (dariusp at ihug.co.nz)