You should be able to save your volume settings by running
as root. Check the man pages for alsactl for more info. Good luck with it. -- J.W.

Meh, I have Ubuntu on my laptop which uses esd and sound typically won't even play on there. I think I'll stick to messing around with ALSA, thanks. In fact, I just searched for a thread on this and surprise surprise, I remembered that I got multiple audio streams playing in ALSA not too long ago:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=311260

The only problem is I have no idea what that .asoundrc file does, or where I got it from. :rolleyes:

AC97 Interference
 

I have what I think is a related AC-97 problem. The clue is the solution.

In Windows XP or Vista, I don't get sound at first. So, I go into control panel and disable my AC-97 sound (yes, it is disabled in the Bios also). Then I get sound.

In SUSE 10.1, I don't get sound at first. So, I run Yast, and go to the hardware/sound area and delete the AC-97 driver info. Then sound works, or at least that was an essential part of the solution. (later I learned that I could get rid of the AC-97 stuff earlier in the installation, which worked even better.)

In other Linuxes (Sabayon, Mepis, Zenwalk, Ubuntu, etc,) I might get sound for a moment, but it soon mysteriously vanishes and I can't figure out how to get it back.

I THINK it's because I can't figure out how to delete the AC97 settings for those distros. I ran into something called blacklist somewhere, and if I could figure out how it's supposed to work, I would (a) look at my Suse and see if the AC 97 is blacklisted there (yay if it is),and (b) I would try blacklisting it elsewhere.

BTW, the sound card that I WANT to use, and can use happily in Suse, is an Audigy somethingorohter. In Suse, another thing that seemed to help is to update my xine-related stuff.

If you have AC-97 and another sound card, it should set up two separate sound devices automatically (I have a USB headset, and when I plug that in I get /dev/dsp1 in addition to the normal /dev/dsp for my onboard sound). It sounds like it's just assigning the second card to to the first sound device if you delete the AC-97 stuff... a lot of programs assume that's the one you want to use, so that would explain why sound is tricky with AC-97 turned on.

I'm not sure what the most elegant solution is... for things that use ALSA, telling them to use hw:1,0 instead of hw:0,0 should work (for OSS, /dev/dsp1 instead of /dev/dsp). I've noticed that it works fine to brute-force OSS-based programs to use a certain device by deleting the current /dev/dsp file and symlinking it to something else. (I'm pretty sure a lot of people would cringe at reading that, but if you use a distro with udev it'll just get reset after a reboot, so no real harm done.)

Linux has no problem with more than one sound device. If the AC97 is turned off in the bios but is still being detected there is something not right with the bios, it could be worth checking for updates. If nothing is available just turn the AC97 back on.
I am assuming you have already run alsaconfig? if it is seeing half an AC97 controller then it may be getting confused but it should still give you a choice of that or the soundblaster to configure.
good luck with it

a clue? Now producing sound using noatun instead of KsCD
 

as stated in other places, after installing FC6 and

getting a successful sound card install with sound emanating from both speakers

KsCD does not produce sound when playing an audio CD.

Today after yum update I got a new kernel 2.6.18-1.2869.fc6 (may be unrelated)

and happened to open the audio CD with Konqueror. I clicked on a music file

and bingo, I can play the CD just like KsCD does normally with sound emanating from both speakers.

This works when logged in as root and when not logged in as root.

All volumes are at max!

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 02)

Never had this problem under FC4 or FC5.

No problem ever under XP Prof