1. A few months ago I got myself Creative bluetooth speakers. I have the following in my ~/.asoundrc.conf:

Some programs such as xmms2 can pick these settings correctly and play music on speakers, but some others such as mplayer can't do that and I always have to pass "-ao alsa:device=bluetooth" what's really annoying (I could create an alias for that but it's just a workaround and not a real solution). What's even more, I can't play sound in 2 programs simultaneously - only one program at a time can play sound. If I open a flash video in Firefox, I need to close it before I can play a song in xmms2. This is all horrible :/

2. How come that my Toshiba n550d netbook has 2 soundcards? alsamixer shows "HD-Audio Generic" and "HDA ATI SB". What's worse, the first card is set as default but it has no controls in alsamixer apart from "S/PDIF". Why, I am asking why, this has happened? I guess it may bring some problems in programs that pick the first available card and treat it as default.

3. What's the relationship between Alsa, PulseAudio and OSS? On my HP Pavilion laptop I installed Linphone, a cool SIP client but I wasn't able to use it with my in-built mic until I set capture device to "OSS: /dev/dsp" in Linphone. I was looking for some general information on how to configure a microphone and I found this: http://alsa.opensrc.org/Record_from_mic. However, this guide contains expressions such as "I am not sure about that" or "Other things to try: " and a list of random thoughts follows. Is this an official Alsa documentation? Another thing is, how to restart Alsa? Is this possible without rebooting your system? Some guides will tell you to reboot your system, is it *really* necessary? On Slackware I use "/etc/rc.d/rc.alsa restart" and it seems to work in most cases. And about PulseAudio, I remember back in days that killing PulseAudio was the very first thing to do after starting the system to able to hear any sound at all.

4. My parents have Acer Aspire d255. It has some problems with in-built microphone - it doesn't work. This bug describes it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/940841. Does anybody know if this problem is solved now in new kernel, new ALSA or is it solved at all? My parents are computer illiterate, they used to have Windows 7 Starter on this machine but it was starting like 15 minutes so I removed it and installed Ubuntu for them. Now I have to explain to them why the microphone doesn't work out of the box.

5. After a few hours of playing in the dark I finally managed to make a video call with Linphone in our LAN between two Linux boxes. However, the person on the other said she couldn't hear me very well. But when I increased "L R Capture" volume in alsamixer on my machine she heard me better but she also heard a terrible low frequency sound in the background. At the end of the day, she said that "Skype on Windows was much better".

I am disgusted. As I said, I tried to make a video call between two Linux machines and laptop cameras didn't give me any problem whatsoever. Sound was a nightmare. Linux is so good for networking and programming but it still has some weak points that prevent it from gaining wider acceptance amongst casual users. Can somebody solve my problems or point me to a comprehensive tutorial on sound system in Linux from the user's point of view?

Short answer - lack of support from hardware manufacturers.
The components used for sound in computers are generic devices that can be wired in many different configurations at the discretion of the hardware manufacturers to support their board layouts. When the computer leaves the factory it will generally have a Windows operating system installed that includes appropriate device drivers and configuration. This is not the case for Linux, so the Linux user has to do the configuration.

1. Support for multiple sound sources should be achievable. How will depend on hardware and Linux distribution.

2. The Toshiba n550d netbook has 2 sound devices: the Realtek HD audio and also audio on the AMD Radeon graphics. You will need to specify which device you want to use as the default. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=146335

3. Configuration again; trying to match hardware to driver to software application. Also, when testing sound, I prefer to reboot as it resets the sound components.

4. Known problem with this hardware. It can be made to work apparently. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=991291

5. Probably fixable with appropriate volume and gain settings for the microphone. If it works in Windows, then the hardware is capable, so a matching configuration is required.

There is no easy answer to this. Solutions need to be worked through on a case by case basis. It used to be the same on Windows too. I remember the happy hours spent trying to configure sound and other device drivers in Windows.

The point about hardware is very true when it comes to quality, but for ease of set-up the distro comes into it too. When I see someone talking about alsamixer and asoundrc, I think to myself "they've got the wrong distro!" I have usb speakers, for instance, which count as a second sound device. Getting them to work involves just a few clicks in CentOS and Salix; with Debian, it means messing about with modprobe.d and re-booting; as for Ubuntu, that just doesn't want to know them. The distros which offer easy control of sound are AntiX, Arios, CentOS, Fedora, Manjaro, Mint (not LMDE), Parsix, Pinguy, Salix, and Solus.

1 members found this post helpful.

David, I don't have USB speakers, but I am considering buying a cheap-ish pair for my Linux box at work, to stream music and such.

What "few clicks" did you do to get these up in Salix? Thanks!

On your first problem: I have a USB headset and I was having difficulty making it default and also being able to play audio from two different sources. The following blog post fixed my problem, you should take a look:

http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2009/03/h...-and-have.html

There's a sound configuration tool: it's either in the Settings or the System section of the menu.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, I'll check it out!