Forcing Creative SoundBlaster to be main audio device

ZakuSage · 12-12-2005, 02:10 PM

About a month ago, I installed a SoundBlaster PCI card into my computer to use instead of this crappy i810 built in thing that sounds horrible wastes CPU clock cycles. Anyway, I'm using Debian with this box, and am trying to make it the default device for ALSA, OSS, and/or ESD. Basically, I still have no idea how to do this. No matter what I do the i810 wants to stay default, and in some applications (snes9x is the main one I'm having problems with) I can't change sound device to use. I've tried finding the line in my /etc/modules.conf that loads the offending i810 device in order to delete it to stop it from loading, but I've still yet to find it. Can anybody help me out with this?

I'm using Debian Sid with 2.6.14 kernel, if it helps.

dmartins · 12-12-2005, 03:36 PM

I have 2 sound cards in my PC too. The only solution i've found is to compile both sound drivers as modules. Which ever one is loaded into the kernel first ends up being the first device file.

I use gentoo so this is probably a bit different but i just have 2 lines in the file /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6:

snd-via82xx
snd-emu10k1

my config for alsa looks like this:

Code:

alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
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
alias snd-card-0 snd-via82xx
alias sound-slot-0 snd-via82xx

alias snd-card-1 snd-emu10k1
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
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

hope this helps

edit: if you don't have a file that is specifically loading the modules then it may be due to your alsa config. I believe that if things are set up properly, alsa will load the kernel module pointed to by the snd-card-x alias when a program tries to access that device.