I'm at wit's end with my sound configuration. I had a working configuration a couple weeks ago with Flash Player 9 beta, xmms, and mplayer properly using ALSA to send sound to the ubs audio SBLive device. After I installed the video capture card however, it seems that the ALSA device was displaced in the sound card order to 1 after the capture card at 0. I had to reconfigure xmms using the options - preferences - output plugin - configure - audio device from hw:0,0 to hw:1,0 and all was well again with xmms. mplayer never hicupped with the video capture install and continues to pump out sound. But Flash Player 9, even after reinstalling the recent update, does not find the sound card device.

I want the video capture card to watch TV. It never was an issue to port sound from this card - I hooked external speakers up to the line out.

I hope somebody wants this challenge, assuming it's not just a Flash Player 9 problem. Please tell me what you need: config files, dmesg, so on and I'll gladly provide them. Thank you in advance for any help or advice you may provide.

Post contents of /etc/modprobe.conf.

Brian

Here are the contents of modprobe.conf as requested. Thank you for looking at this.

# /etc/modprobe.conf
alias usb-controller ehci-hcd
alias usb-controller1 ohci-hcd
alias eth0 nvnet
alias forcedeth off
alias scsi_hostadapter sata_nv
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-0
#module options should go here
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
#card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

On a whim, I went back and re-did everything related to sound since installing centOS v4.4. That did the trick.

It appears from what I did that the following is true:
- ALSA needs to be re-compiled and re-installed if the kernel sound changes. The kernel has minimal alsa content built in so most likely I will need to maintain a leading-edge alsa build alongside the kernel.
- MPlayer needs the same tender loving care for sound and ALSA changes.
- Early versions of kernel 2.6 and ALSA did not support the NVIDIA sound.

So when a later version of kernel 2.6 (I'm up to 2.6.9-42.0.3) was installed, ALSA became incompatible. Further, the on-board sound became available and I didn't know it.

By updating everything, the desktop volume control now shows three mixer devices: Intel ICH (on-board), Bt878 (video capture), and SBLive!. It's up to each program to connect to these available outputs. XMMS has a nice built in configuration tool to select either the built-in or SBLive! Everything else finds the built-in, via alsa-oss (I think...Not sure about this point). The video capture does not appear to have a software path down the PCI so sound jumper goes to the built-in board line-in controlled by "line-in" on the ICH mixer. FlashPlayer works nicely through the built-in.

NOTE: I did NOT install NVIDIA sound driver, though I did install NVIDIA ethernet and NVIDIA video drivers.

Now that everything works, I'm reluctant to change modprobe.conf. Normally, alsaconf and alsactl combine to make these changes. I did not use them. Below is my final modprobe.conf

# modprobe.conf
alias usb-controller ehci-hcd
alias usb-controller1 ohci-hcd
alias eth0 nvnet
alias forcedeth off
alias scsi_hostadapter sata_nv

# ALSA portion. Video capture is card 1. SBLive! is card 2.
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-0
alias snd-card-1 snd-emu10k1

#module options should go here
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
#card #1.
#alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
#alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
#alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
#alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
#alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
#card #2. Don't know if this change needed.
alias sound-service-1-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-1-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-1-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-1-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-1-12 snd-pcm-oss

I've got this thing wired now. I can swap the order of insertion of the sound modules so that the SBLive! usb-audio board comes up as default instead of the on-board intel8x0 card. The way to accomplish this is:

1. Verify that neither intel8x0 and usb-audio are compiled into the kernel and are available as modules. The only reason they would be compiled in is if you did it as part of a custom kernel. Look in /usr/src/kernels/<kernel>/.config for CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0=m and CONFIG_SND_USB_AUDIO=m to confirm you can do what follows. You could also execute 'du -a /lib |grep -i intel8x0' and 'du -a /lib |grep -i usb-audio' and see snd-intel8x0m.ko and snd-usb-audio.ko available for your kernel.

2. Keep the onboard intel8x0 module from being loaded at automatic startup. Add a line 'snd-intel8x0' to /etc/hotplug/blacklist.

3. Add following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit (or the equivalent for your distro):

modprobe snd-usb-audio
sleep 5
modprobe snd-intel8x0


4. Turn off system sound, or it will totally hog the SBLive! card. Go to Applications-Preferences-Sound and disable 'Enable sound server startup'.

5. I also changed /etc/modprobe.conf to

alias snd-card-0 snd-usb-audio
alias snd-card-1 snd-intel8x0
alias snd-card-2 snd-bt87x

though this may not be necessary.

You will have to change mplayer and xmms sound output options. xmms is easy with the options-preferences-configure menu. For mplayer, it is really easy if you use gmplayer (special, somewhat difficult installation) or try '-ao oss:device=/dev/dsp' or their variants on the mplayer command line interface.

The GNOME Volume Control applet confirms your setup. The first tab is the first card.

Note to newbies (that was me 2 days ago!): Most of these applications are asynchronous, threaded applications. This means that you sometimes have to wait for changes to be remembered by the application (about 10 seconds). Just don't become click-crazy and become bewildered why nothing seems to work. Another thing that happens is that the gui applications sometimes are looking for changes of state rather than state itself. So if sound is mute and the checkbox shows un-muted, check and uncheck it anyway to create a change of state and it'll probably turn the sound on.

You have to reinstall alsa after installing and booting on a new kernel.