I'm having trouble getting the sound to work on my new linux box.
I run alsaconf, it detects the onboard sound, and everything seems
to work fine, but no sound . . . .
cds play perfectly, but if I try to use mpg123 or xmms or any other
player, I get nothing. It appears to be playing, but no sound.
I've checked the mixer setings with alsamixer, and everything is turned
up and fine
the sound is built into my motherboard
it's a ASRock K7S41 board, and the manual just states the sound as
"5.1 channels AC'97 Audio"
alsaconf detect the sound as
"intel8x0 Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) Sound Contoller (rev a0)"

I'm running slackware 10.1

any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm stumped

I've seen once a PC with input and output female jack reversed. Can't help you more, sry .

Are you sure everything isn't muted?

I don't think the jacks are reversed, because audio cds will play through the jack.
and I'm pretty sure everything isn't muted, I've checked alsamixer. . . . could it be
muted somewhere else somehow?
to make things more confusing, I've installed the same version of slackware on a different
computer, and the sound works fine with the same commands. So intuitively it doesn't
seem like it could be something that's turned off by default.

any other suggestions?

Compile alsa from source.
http://www.alsa-project.org/

There are several "muting" points on any PC, and they should all be checked. For example:

1. Are the speakers plugged in and powered on?
2. Are the speakers plugged into the correct jack on the soundcard?
3. Is the volume on the speakers turned up?
4. Are the volume settings in alsamixer unmuted?
5. Have you gone through all the alsamixer settings (using the arrow keys)?
6. Is the volume level on the sound app (XMSS, KsCD, etc) turned up?
7. If you are using headphones and they have a volume control, is it turned up?

There may be others, and the above checklist will not necessarily solve the problem since it's just a list of things to inspect, but as you know many times the appearance of a sound problem may just be due to a volume setting being set too low somewhere. Good luck with it -- J.W.

i have the same board with the exact same prob but im using suse 9.2 so if anyone can give more help as im still looking for the anwer that will be great
thank you

I have the same problem with no sound with alsa on my vaio PCG-4D4P with slackware 10.1
No error messages and no sound
I works fine on windows sound is there, so it must be software related.
Any help greatly appreciated.

I've got a similar problem. I have all of my volumes up in alsamixer, and the system notifications work just fine, but I have absolutely no sound from any of the CD players. They are playing the CDs though.
ta0kira

CDs work differently somehow, I'm not sure how it's all set up, but once I had a comp that wouln't play CDs through the motherboard although you can always plug your speakers into the headphone jack on the front of the CD drive.

On my computer with this lack of sound problem, I can in fact play CDs through the jack in the motherboard. I don't know why I forgot to mention it earlier. . . I'm not sure, but I think CDs may even play if you haven't configured any sound at all.

the CD drives must run through a different audio channel or something,
I'm not sure how it works exactly.
Maybe someone could give us a rundown on the subject. . .


Oh, and if you just need a quick fix to get some tunes on the computer rip the CDs into MP3 or ogg vorbis files, if your system notification sounds and whatnot are working, your should be able to play back audio files. (I think) and unless your computer is extremely old, compressed audio shouldn't be a problem. (mpg123 worked fine for me on an old 90mhz Pentium I, whereas I couldn't find a single windows mp3 player that could work on that machine without lagging up and playing choppy music.)

Yeah, I think JackSmith is on to something.

When I built my computer, I remember having to get a cable that went from the cd-rom drive to the motherboard. Maybe there's a problem there.

well that's probably exactly the problem in the case of the cdroms not playing audio. ta0kira, it's probably a cable you need to connect to the motherboard like kram said. I guess look into your hardware documentation.

But this still doesn't give us any insight into the problem that me and others are having, namely that we get audio out of the cdrom, but no audio from stuff originating from the onboard sound on the motherboard.

dolman, just curious, but where did you get your motherboard?, mine came in a $200 walmart box that had xandros preinstalled.

I have a similar problem with suse 9.3
I found that if i reinstall the driver there is sound 'till next boot, but this works just sometimes.

I am on a VAIO laptop which came with XP, and the CD player worked fine before I took XP off, therefore I'm pretty sure everything is connected where it should be. If not, I'm sure it's a proprietary motherboard with some "special technology" that bypasses any connection that would be needed if I wasn't using XP. Thanks for the suggestion though.
ta0kira

I also have something like the 5.1 channels AC'97 Audio, on a VIA motherboard.
Two things fixed the problem:
The first was to open up the widest (most controls) mixer I could find, and check the volume levels on all the sliders. The *real*, or at least an extra, 'master' volume was way over on the right with a more or less meaningless label.

Also, check for help at www.alsa-project.org

There I found these crucial aliases to put into modules.conf (or conf.modules, depending on distro):

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-via82xx
# module options should go here

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

And maybe:

# card #1
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

That fixed it.
(until I tried adding hfs usb modem -- doesn't get along with AC97 sound.)

Good luck