No sound on Mandrake 10 Official with VIA VT8233
 

Relevant specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (Thoroughbred-B, 2,083MHz, 256KB L2 Cache)
Epox 8K9Ai mainboard
onboard VIA VT8233 AC97 audio
Altec Lansing ATP3 2.1ch speakers

I'm having problems with my sound - it was working fine until this morning. Attempting to play an MP3 with Totem resulted in silence. I tried to play an Audio CD and that worked. Rebooting the box didn't solve the problem. I upgraded the installed Community Edition to the Official Edition, and everything was fine and dandy... except for the sound. Now I have no audio whatsoever - even Audacity and the CD Player refuse to work.

I've tried practically every trick in the book; the hardware configuration seems correct; HardDrake shows the VT8233 [AC97 Audio Controller] to be present and functional. I tried starting and stopping the ALSA daemon, that didn't help. I also switched between the two available drivers, but no such luck. No dice with the volume control applet and GNOME ALSA mixer, either. The boot sequence shows the ALSA daemon to be loading correctly, along with the modules for my soundcard. I booted to Windows XP Professional and tested the sound... sure enough, it was there. The speakers are in place and correctly configured.

Here's the output from HardDrake:

Vendor: VIA Technologies

Alternative drivers: via82cxxx_audio

Bus: PCI

Bus identification: 1106:3059:1695:3005

Location on the bus: 0:11:5

Description: VT8233 [AC97 Audio Controller]

Module: snd-via82xx

Media class: MULTIMEDIA_AUDIO

Please tell me if you require more information, and I shall endeavour to provide it.

What could cause somthing that was working fine to go bonkers all of a sudden? I did not make any changes in Linux; I just turned the box on and played some music, only to be greeted with no sound. Any help will be appreciated; it's no fun computing in silence! :(

Update: Turns out the sound is working, but at a very low volume. How do I increase the volume? The GNOME ALSA Mixer and Volume COntrol applet aren't helping much, even with the sliders set to full.

The CD player also has its own volume control slider bar. Is that one turned up as well? -- J.W.

problem with VT82C686 sound card
 

I too am having trouble with a VT82C686 Apollo Super AC97/Audio sound card under
Mandrake 10 on my HP Pavilion ZT1130 laptop. The card was recognized on installation and also by Drakconf and alsaconf. I am able to play back audio, but it repeats
in a weird pattern. If I play a small file (roughly, 0.5 sec) it is played back perfectly
but repeated seven times. If I play a longer file, sections are repeated, as if there
is a window moving through the file. I have no idea what could cause this or what
to do about it.

try alsamixer and amixer

I've tried turning up the volume for wach application I use, and this doesn't help, even at maximum levels. I have tried the volume control applet and application, and installed GNOME ALSA Mixer, all to no avail - the sound volume is ridiculously low. Is there a way to bring it back to normal? The sound works fine under Windows and was OK under Linux until a few days ago, for no apparent reason.