[SOLVED] sound stopped working in Debian7

xiongnu · 08-08-2013, 01:10 PM

i upgraded to Debian 7 from 6 earlier this week on my desktop pc. everything worked after the upgrade

But somehow a day later i suddenly lost sound, without any change to the hardware or software.

i've looked at Sound Mixer setting but it doesn't help. PC has K8N Neo Platinum motherboard with onboard Realtek ALC850 sound.

any ideas?

rtmistler · 08-08-2013, 02:28 PM

Suggestions are to check your system log from boot up and see if there are any anomalies detected when loading the driver for the Realtek. Then attempt to play something; like use aplay to play a simple sound file; see if there's any errors output to the shell and further if there are complaints added to the system log.

My guess is that the ALSA driver may be different between Debian 6 and 7 (I don't really know) and as a result, even though it may be updated, it may now be broken. I've seen a lot of this with older Intel codec chips. Performing a search for problems with Realtek ALC850 and Debian 7 may also give you some results and/or solutions. Many times if there is a solution it's the adding of a static definition to a config file to tell the driver to not probe, but instead use a specific device type and once that's done it may work.

goumba · 08-12-2013, 06:47 AM

I've had ALSA break between kernel versions within Wheezy itself. You must boot with the same kernel version that stored the settings.

Are there any devides listed if typing

Code:

aplay -L

in a terminal window? If not, your driver module is not being laoded.

If there are devices being loaded, and assuming all the necessary modules are, in a terminal, type

Code:

sudo /usr/sbin/alsactl store

press enter, and reboot. This last command was all that it took to fix the problem for me.

xiongnu · 08-12-2013, 08:31 PM

here's my output of 'aplay -L'

Code:

erdos@16big:~$ aplay -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
default:CARD=CK8S
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    Default Audio Device
sysdefault:CARD=CK8S
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    Default Audio Device
front:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S
    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=CK8S,DEV=0
    NVidia CK8S, NVidia CK8S - IEC958
    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

however, after run this, i still have no sound,
'sudo /usr/sbin/alsactl store',

then i went back to 'Mixer' settings, and enabled 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPOSA' from 'Select Controls' and adjusted it to higher volume, and woola, I got sound. Previously this particular control wasn't selected.

Thank you for the great help!