I have a asus m4a78t-e motherboard with onboard audio where i disabled it threw bois to install a PCI soundcard which likely has better linux support.... where upon frist boot it runs fine... and will run fine at times for day or 2.... but then suddenly firefox will refuse to make noise and LOTS of other related errors like amarok and audacity won't play as well.. but strangely things like VLC media player still making noise in contrast to all that..... which can't EVER fix anything until i remove the PCI card and return to the sub-par onboard audio... which this has happend in repeats with over 2 pci soundcards, everything runs fine for like 2-3 days them ... BOOM.. firefox is dead, and 90% of things won't work getting strange errors... until return to onboard sound, FRUSTRATING

*the sound card i want to install is a PCI ctreative labs CT4750 which was running EXCELLENT microphone working in aducaity and everything...

*but had same problem as well with a sound blaster audigy 2 zs, which run EXCELLENT in slackware 12.2 but if goto use it... tons problems slack 13

betcha there's a dsp0 & dsp1, or else there wants to be.

The chip onboard is likely to be seen first. In theory dsp* should be summed in /dev/dsp, but that's like bread falling jammy side up :-P.

You an handle it this way in a sound.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/
alias sound-slot-0 pci card(module names, not cards)
alias sound-card-0 pci card(module names, not cards)
install bad-card-module good-card-module

I reinstalled my pci card ... and disabled on-board sound... only to discover ounce again no sound in Firefox, no sound in virtualbox, amork... HOWEVER still working sound on everything else... vlc media player gives a warning but still works,
*it appears my system had saved some settings... because maybe alsactl store or something so after uninstalling it reinstalled with bad configuration... when normally works for few days before having these errors

I don't know what could give for better information but surfing net i found these commands for info

lspci -v | grep -i audio
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation GF104 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 07)

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 0: ES1371/1 [ES1371 DAC2/ADC]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: AudioPCI [Ensoniq AudioPCI], device 1: ES1371/2 [ES1371 DAC1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

my sound.conf reads

# --- BEGIN: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. ---
# --- ALSACONF version 1.0.24.2 ---
alias snd-card-0 snd-ens1371
alias sound-slot-0 snd-ens1371
# --- END: Generated by ALSACONF, do not edit. ---

I created a .asoundrc in my home directory and now firefox works... but i can't play more than 1 sound device at ounce... like i can play vlc it's self..... firefox it's self.... but not both at ounce


pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 0
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 0 #this may cause alsamixer to crash with "cannot open mixer: Invalid argument"
}

How come lspci and aplay can see the onboard card (the nvidia chipset one) although it is disabled in bios ??

that's not on-board sound... that some STRANGE thing related to my nvidia video card linux driver

my on-board sound is...... "ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)" so it was disabled


i followed some lunatic avdice online and removed the 'nvidia' stuff buy adding this to rc.local, however despite that cause
still reads as 'card1 instead of card 0' so stuff still trying to goto card 0 it appears.... despite nvidia stuff is now gone
echo 1 > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/0000:01:00.1/remove

Drivers are inclined to take the approach of asking "What have we here?" Anything that answers gets configured. I repeat: in /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf

install bad-card-module good-card-module
aqnd if necessary:
blacklist bad card module.

i am going to admit defeat and stick to my onboard sound..... i discovered that VLC media player has a graphic equalizer so it reduces me needs to use my PCI soundcard (likely doesn't make sense but modestly based on truth cause amarok doesn't like to play when i use flash games like zomg in gaia online... but oddly vlc media player works where i use graphic equalizer so my ears don't bleed using headphones)


*it's misleading for me to say the PCI soundcard is not working when i install it... appears to be drivers everything works fine.... where seems my software is somehow configured to use 'card 0' when the new card i install is card 1.. if i create
a .asoundrc with.. (see below) it all works HOWEVER only 1 device at a time.... since i use things like virtualbox which runs
strange kernal drivers.... (by the way i aslo using the multilib system so my 64 bit slackware runs 32 bit.. so that as well
makes me feel i shound just give up on this... just use my onboard because... think the software is config to my onboard in some DEEP ROOTED sense... maybe when i run slackbuilds it compiled things based on it's name somehow 'don't know'

>your suggested idea of using "install bad-card-module good-card-module" sort of complex from what i understand especially after removing the nvidia stuff from loading at all.... so .... there is only that soundcard running .. but it's still card 1
and not card 0..... (DUDE cant' say i know entirely what i am talking about... but with in my knowledge all strangely complex

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 0
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 0 #this may cause alsamixer to crash with "cannot open mixer: Invalid argument"
}

Sounds like both your sound card and onboard sound are both fighting to output the sound.
You probably do not have speakers on your onboard sound anymore, so you do not hear it.
BusinessKid is right in that these drivers will discover the hardware, and you have to disable things on the motherboard using the BIOS. No guarantee that the BIOS does disable it.

Putting your new sound card at some other name as a second audio device should have worked, so have to look at what could make that fail.
They must not end up using the same I/O addresses. The PCI auto-configure might possibly be in conflict with the onboard sound. Because they are on different buses it would not be a direct fight, but the I/O device steering logic would have to eventually get confused (mem mapped to your PCI card, and then suddenly changed to mem map to the onboard hardware by some program discovering it).
Probably when some X program tries to discover what sound devices are out there.
HAL and UDEV are probably the source of this discovery and blacklisting the onboard sound in them would help (but I do not know how to do that yet).
Much of this is conjecture and hard to prove, or catch it at it.

Alsa is supposed to be able to handle multiple devices, but setting up even one is so hard as to make that a major suspect.
Then there is timidity, which also needs to know which device it plays to. KDE has its own configuration. Each sound player has some of its own configuration.

KDE and some X programs have a tendency to configure themselves as they want, based on discovery.
I have fights with them to use the sound I want, and have not solved this yet.

"KDE and some X programs have a tendency to configure themselves as they want, based on discovery.
I have fights with them to use the sound I want, and have not solved this yet."

That sounds more like the idea.... because the hardware is working when i use it.... just suddenly firefox will stop producing sound.... but VLC media player will work..... however other programs stopped working where i can create .asoundrc will change
and effect things massively suddenly firefox WILL work.....

really is nothing i goto do that often can't slove in matter of minutes, slackware has been my primary os for years... it's just REALLY IS something wierd with this sound card issue.....

with previous releases of linux i never had this problem in slackware 12.2 i never had this problem... but same hardware in slackware 13.37 will going insane..... "great" and a trend i notice about things all too often

In spite of some of the great KDE programs, I am going to abandon it in favor of xfce4 or another lightweight manager. KDE has become bloated and uncontrollable, like a Microsoft product, including the nonsense that drove me away from Microsoft in the first place.
I recommend trying this sound card with xfce4 or twm or fvwm.
I got to try Gnome too, when I can find time to deal with something so massive (got the Slackware Gnome packages from the Slackware Gnome website).

Also, KDE sound players will create TWO instances of themselves, and they both try to play at once, and until you KILL one, sound is really screwed up. This happens any time you double click on a sound file or video file, instead of only single clicking. And when you close one, it does not quit, it hangs around on the status bar, still playing to the sound card. I have seen FOUR instances of the same program on the status bar, all playing at once. And every action to play a sound creates another one, it never detects or uses the existing player.
When that happens, the sounds from other programs get chopped up.
Some of them SUM their contributions, but others seem to fight for total control of the sound channel.

(Change your preferences to double click to execute if you cannot stop double clicking files)

I already have for the same reason. I don't spend on the latest cpus, and got sick of looking at an hourglass.

On a brighter note, you can install the kdelibs package and run those nice programs you are talking about. My /opt/kde3 only reports 20k in answer to 'du -sh' but I have k3b running on this system.

i used to love kde and kde4 made me seriously depressed so bad i put off upgrading to a 64 bit computer just to evade being forced to use a new version of slackware which had KDE4, however of coarse i did do it..... and no matter how much i am used to it.... it's not much of a enjoyable experience.... feels like i am using a windows product.... where i miss using linux... which makes me angry cause i am using F@#$# slackware.....

*it's not just the soundcard... been noticing great deal of things reducing in overall quality... technology is sort of devolving something fearsome.... aslo been finding it funny been changing the names of tons of software to 'softer' sounding names... i am just babbling but not shock me that slackware could be renamed to coffeetable where they replace tux with a coffee mug logo... to look more like Debian so it doesn't scare cow-eye balled authoritatives feeling that the cool image of slackware looks to hacker-like in it's spirit... so to rename slackware.. and it's logo... might help evade future conflicts where these cow-eye balled politicians try to bash anything don't understand with sopa-like rules

Should also note that this latest xorg has changed how it discovers hardware. You could have two drivers on your sound card, and one is screwing up the other at some point.

Xorg docs and code cannot be trusted. In spite of my explicit declaration in xorg.conf that the keyboard is to use the keyboard driver, it will discover the hardware using UDEV and load evdev as a keyboard driver, so I would have two drivers on the same keyboard. Took a while to figure that one out, and not easy to get xorg to not load evdev driver for the keyboard. Had to disable loading drivers for discovered hardware, which means my power buttons do not get drivers loaded.

I cannot figure what xorg is up to, they seemed determined to make xorg only for people with the latest detectable hardware. I had to patch the mousedrv to make it recognize the "Device" and "Protocol" lines like in the docs. They had the tests for those "Device" and "Protocol" lines before they issued the call to get the options from the xorg.conf file (all the other option tests are after).