Anyone who has a working alsa, DO NOT DIST-UPGRADE to sid's version. It throroughly borked my soundcard. It's still fully recognized and the driver loaded, but the sound just doesn't get passed to the speakers.

This is a known issue and a patch has been written so fix it, but I don't know how to apply this patch. I tried removing my alsa and installing an older version but for some reason that had zero effect.

Any ideas on how I can resolve this?

Nothing wrong with my sound and I have the latest alsa-* from sid.

mine works perfectly as well......using 2.9 kernel and totally sid

Any ideas on what I should do? I had working sound, I dist-upgraded, and now I don't. According to #debian on freenode alsa-base is still borked.

This must be a hardware specific issue. In my Debian Sid box with ESS Allegro sound card (maestro3) I find Alsa a bit unstable -- when I boot between operating systems the sound is sometimes muted (and doesn't respond to mixer) but mostly it works.

I've added a skip line for maestro3 (skip maestro3) in /etc/discover.conf which, I believe, prevents discover from loading the OSS module for my sound card. Now "lsmod" shows that snd_maestro3 is loaded and I believe that this is the Alsa module. I'm not expert on these sound issues but before I added the skip line, I just got screeching noises from all sound apps. Now Alsa (mostly) works as expected.

I'd suggest that you rerun "alsaconf" and then "alsamixer" to make sure that Master and PCM are not muted.

woot

Thanks, rerunning alsaconf fixed the issue. When I installed the borked package it messed up my conf. But the package is fixed now and alsaconf restored my card.

Thanks again.

so obviously one must re-run alsaconf ...therefore ...nothing is wrong with alsa (unstable)...in many cases when making servere changes in the OS ...conf files change...