Want to find Linux compatible USB sound card

palminas · 03-16-2008, 08:22 PM

Hello everyone.

I have a computer that has an Intel 440MX sound device onboard. It always acts up. I have had it working for weeks, then it will stop working one day, and I will do everything imaginable in SUSE to get it working, and it just won't work. And then, one day, it will start working again.

Well, that tells me "hardware issue/ghosting" and as it is a laptop it isn't so easy to just replace the sound device. I know there are PCMCIA sound devices, but I want to keep my PCMCIA slots free for other uses.

I have found various USB sound cards that reportedly work well under Windows (such as from CL, Turtle Beach, and others) but none list Linux compatibility on their boxes (duh).

Does anyone have a recommendation for a USB sound device that works well in Linux? I am using openSUSE 10.3 with XFCE 4.4. I only need stereo out. Mic would be nice but rarely if ever used so not necessary.

Turtle Beach makes a cheap one available on TigerDirect for 30 bucks... would this one work?

I am a 4 year Linux user, so I am fine with some command line setup and whatnot... I just want to KNOW it is possible before I start. I am not the experimenting type.

Thanks.

tredegar · 03-17-2008, 06:11 AM

My brother got some "Bose Companion5" external USB speakers. Expensive, yes. They sound pretty good (compared to the little laptop speakres). Anyway, he wanted me to make them work with his linux. To my surprise, it was easy: they were recognised as an external USB soundcard, and I just configured linux to use that rather than the internal chipset (on his laptop).

I expect that if you get pretty much any run-of-the-mill USB soundcard, it'll work. Do you know anyone with a USB soundcard that you could borrow to test? If you have trouble, come back here.

jiml8 · 03-17-2008, 12:49 PM

There have been issues in some systems and some distros with acpi not passing interrupts reliably to sound. This means that the sound system never gets interrupted and the result is that you have no sound.

You might try disabling acpi to see if your sound problems vanish.