Trouble getting Creative Labs SB Audigy LS to work. (no such device)
 

Hey,

I just bought a soundblaster live soundcard, but I can't get it to work. I am running debian unstable and GNU/Linux 2.6.9.

The card shows up as "Creative Labs SB Audigy LS" in lspci, but alsamixer cant find it.

I have compiled and installed alsa-driver, libs and utils 1.0.7 my self, added the /etc/modutils/alsa, run update-modules and inserted all the modules I was told to insert, by the alsa-project homepage (couldn't post url here) but still:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

I have tried various kernel-configurations, but with no luck. Currently I only got
CONFIG_SOUND=y

Does anybody have a solution to my problem? (the card works fine in windows)

Hi fbred, welcome to lq. Could you post the output from lspci -v? Have you tried alsaconf yet?
good luck.

lspci -v as root:

0000:02:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy LS
Subsystem: Creative Labs: Unknown device 1006
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 21
I/O ports at b000 [size=32]
Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

Yes, I have tried alsaconf a couple times, but I didn't find any PCI cards, and asked if I wanted to probe for ISA. For some reason it found my card this time, and tried to configure it. I see a errormessage a brief second, think it is "no soundcars found" before alsaconf clears the screen (couldn't log it with alsaconf -L either) and prints "Now ALSA is ready to use.", but neither alsamixer nor aumix works.

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device
aumix: error opening mixer

I also found this message in dmesg:

ALSA /root/alsa/alsa-driver-1.0.7/alsa-kernel/pci/ac97/ac97_codec.c:1964: AC'97 0 does not respond - RESET
ALSA /root/alsa/alsa-driver-1.0.7/alsa-kernel/pci/ac97/ac97_codec.c:1972: AC'97 0 access is not valid [0x0], removing mixer.
AudigyLS: probe of 0000:02:05.0 failed with error -5

Thank you very much for helping me.

Fredrik.

Are the modules loaded? If not try modprobing them.
good luck.

As I said, I have inserted all the modules instructed by alsa, and all of them show up on lsmod.

snd-audigyls, snd-pcm-oss, snd-mixer-oss and snd-seq-oss.

I think the snd-audigyls module error only occur one time pr reboot. (AudigyLS: probe of 0000:02:05.0 failed with error -5)

The module I was looking for is snd-c0106, it was just pure luck that i ever found that out. The sound works now, but the quality is not as good as it is supposed to be.

A link to where/how you found this info could bring more luck to others. :D
good luck.

First of all, I misspelled the module name, it is snd-ca0106. I actually read it in the Linux kernel 2.6.11rc1 changelog. I haven't seen any links to this module on the alsapage, but the installation is similar to all the other modules.

The ca0106 link you are looking for might be this: http://www.alsa-project.org/~james/a...er/ca0106.old/

If I were you, (this is what I did) i'd install the cvs version of alsa-driver..and as you already know, use the c0106 driver (--with-cards-ca0106). I don't know if it's just me, but the cvs version as compared to 1.0.7 has much better sound quality for this card.

OKey, I'll try it out. The only soundapps I currently use is mplayer and xmms. Xmms produced okay sound when using the OSS output, but with alsa the sound was unacceptable bad. I couldn't get good sound with mplayer either.

My number one reason for buying a new soundcard, was that I wanted a card that could handle more than one process at a time. (f.eks firefox flash-sound, xmms and mplayer simultaneously without esd etc.) My integrated card (snd-intel8x0) couldn't do that, and not my new card either. Should I buy another one?

It's not the card. To have all sounds play at the same time..they all must be using the same sound engine. For emample..if you use kde, it uses arts to play sounds...so when using xmms you'd want to use the arts plugin, and have everything else use arts. That's what I do anyway, and all is well.

-edit

I think that's the only way to do it? Correct me if i'm wrong.