So many AC-97 sound problems, lets bring them to a single thread.
 

There are dozens of AC-97 sound problems in these forums, and they all center around two key factors:

1. No or super low sound
2. AC-97 based audio, most onboard.

So let's sum them up in this one thread. What is your problem, what distro do you have and what is your sound card?

My problem is I hear super low sound. I have run alsamixer and alsaconf and something else another nice poster suggested, set all my levels to 74 except MIC I set to 0 because I have a mic and don't want it blasting. I have noticed that I can play cds in kscd at normal volume, and my mic sounds normal. When I play an MP3 in any player I get super almost non-existant volume. I tried maxing out all mixer levels, and turning my speakers up as load as they go. It seams mp3's are a popular problem also with ac-97 users. I run suse 9.1 personal with CMedia onboard 8738 audio. I have tried removing the card through yast and restarting and redetecting it in yast. When I click the "test" button in the volume-adjusting portion of the sound setup section of yast I can only barely hear sound if I max all volume out.

Is there some sort of "reset" button for sound?

I run Slackware 10.1 with the 2.6.11 kernel and I have an intel 810x0 soundcard. I get no sound. I've tried compiling alsa and the driver into the kernel, and I've also compiled them as modules, and nothing works.

Here's my problem
 

Here is my scenario:
My motherboard is an MSI K8N Neo2 Plat with onboard Realtek AC97 audio. My sound works fine when using the OSS driver - I can play mp3s, I can play games, the winex oss driver works well for playing games through Cedega. Interestingly however, when playing an mp3 for example, I can adjust the volume using either the OSS or the Alsa mixer. When going into the preferences of xmms, the device is listed as hw : oss. If I switch the device to Alsa Realtek AC97 - I get no sound, but no errors.
Two notes:
In my device manager, I have many unknown hardware entries. All of my hardware is functional as far as I know, aside from this sound issue. The unknown hardware is pretty non-descriptive - all it gives is a memory address in hex.
Also, I am running an AMD64 3500+, however I used the i386 installation of ubuntu (warty) because currently the AMD64 package entries under apt/synaptic are still a bit lacking.
I am not sure what other info, such as output or screenshots would be helpful but I'd be more than happy to post additional information if you let me know.
Thanks!

Yeah! My audio is back!
 

YEAH! I got my audio to work!

It has allot to do with YOU and the linux kernal and my graphics driver. What I did is I made sure all my hardware was detected correctly in Yast, then I updated all my drivers with YOU then I reinstalled the old kernal from the CD and updated it again...why this worked I don't know :)

Linux runs 50% faster with the new Nvidia drivers and my graphics card setup right.

I would say thank God for Linux, but I don't believe so thank Novell!

Nathan,
Are you using an AC97 based chip, or an nforce soundstorm chip? I was not sure whether the nvidia drivers on their site were based on only soundstorm chips. If you're using ac97 based sound, I'll definitely give that a shot. Also, are you able to use the alsa driver for applications, or just OSS?

Yes
 

I have a PcChips M800 motherboard with onboard Ac-97 CMedia 8738 audio.

Nvidia makes audio cards? I didn't know that. I believe the main reason to get the new nvidia driver would be for the 3d acceleration.

Anywho I shared how I fixed my problem, update your drivers then reload the linux kernal and my sound works like a charm.

and yes I can use alsaconf and alsamixer to configure my card/chip/motherboard.

Glock Shooter

Try muting "external amplifier
" under alsamixer or your gui mixer. Some hardware vendors mix this up when they design their boards.

Eric

I tried that and it didn't work. The weird thing is alsamixer, aumix, and kdemix all work, but I can't use gnomes volume controls. It tells me no mixer elemements and or devices found.

The only other problem that that I can think of is the fact that snd-intel8x0m, which is a modem driver tends to start first unless you blacklist the modem driver in /etc/hotplug/blacklist and have it load in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules instead.

Eric

9.2
 

I didn't have any problems with sound after I updated to Suse 9.2, so maybe they fixed it in this version.

I could add to this but that is for another forum/thread.

I have the same audio is that guy Ive had no problems whatsoever, if its fedora core, the volumes turned down way low by default. Ive had suse, debian, college linux, etc no probs at all.

hi all

i used mandrek 10.1
my driver is realtek AC97

my driver is setup and i see my driver in controle but i play mp3 iam not sound .??

who to answer this problem ???????????????????


thnx

for everyone...
try changing module parameters
go to ALSA site
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php
and choose you sound card manufacturer


for my card (VIA 8235, Realtek655)
i changed these options
ac97_quirk=0
and
dxs_support=4

hope that help

Re: Here's my problem
 

I have the same motherboard, however I only use the ALSA driver. Things have been....less than great, but I haven't had any time to fix the problems lately. Here are the specific issues I'm having..

1) On startup, all volume levels are zeroed. I have to open up alsamixer and increase the volume levels by hand each time I start up.

2) I only have a single audio channel. I can hear things fine when there's only one device using the audio, but I can't play two things no matter what.


I tried going to http://www.alsa-project.org/, but it looks like it's down. :( Grrr

R00ts, that site has been down for a long while (well, several days, anyway, long in the internet). Anybody know what's up with that?

Anyway, I've never had any success at all playing multiple things using ALSA alone. I recommend running esd (the sound server gnome uses, though you don't have to run gnome) or some other sound daemon and telling your programs to use that. Works in most cases.

Also, slsimic has good suggestions; I've especially heard that "ac97_quirk=0" helps in many cases, though it made no difference for me.