EzDevInfo.com

alsa-base.conf missing in new Raspberry Pi Raspbian Jesse

I'm trying to make my Pi use an external USB sound card as a default.

All tutorials are telling me to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

However the version of Raspbian I have (pretty new build, I just installed it a week or two ago) doesn't have this fine - it's empty when I try and edit it.

Does anyone know how to change the sound card boot priority now that this file is gone?

Thanks, Carl

Hook two computers to one speaker?

Is it OK to take the line-out from the audio card on two computers, hook them up to a y-adapter that finally goes to a single pair of speakers? I would just go ahead and try it, but don't want to blow up a sound card if it's a bad idea.

Thanks

Is there a difference between speaker and headphone jacks/ports?

I have a 2.1 speaker setup going into my computer, but primarily plug them into the headphone jack as it is easier to access. I do this because I switch between a couple different devices with these speakers. At one point I plugged them into the speaker port and noticed a very slight difference in the volume. Now both volumes in the properties are at the same level, but the noise coming out was slightly different.

So do the 2 ports have different "levels" of output? Volume, bass, treble...?

How to make Alsa pick a preferred sound device automatically?

I bought an USB sound card. I'd like to set up my Linux desktop so that it prefers the USB device, if it is plugged in and automatically switches as the device is (un)plugged. Is it possible, and how?

How does a sound card determine if headphones are plugged in?

This is actually two questions in one.

1. First, how do soundcards (the cheap ones) "detect" whether the headphones are plugged in? By measuring resistance or by some other technique?

2. Second, can I somehow have different sound outputs sent to the speakers and the headphones? I'm guessing no, at least no on the cheap ones. What does one need to accomplish that?

(I've no idea about anything related to sound save of listening to mp3's, so this may be overly simple question to some.)

I am hearing my screen

Today I installed sound card drivers of my motherboard (Asus P6T SE), and now I have started hearing the things that are happening on my screen. When I scroll, or change windows, basically cause a redraw on screen, I hear noises kind of resembles each action. And I am not on drugs.

What causes this and how can I fix that?

Windows 7 laptop's volume with headphones way too loud

I have two headphones, neither has any amps or volume control, and both have the same problem with this computer. I normally have the volume on 10%, and that is optimal. I'm still very afraid that someday it will be at 100% and i'll accidentally have my headphones on.

I tested how loud it is at maximum volume -- it's earsplittingly loud! In fact, it's so loud that if I lay the headphones down on the table, I can listen to a song perfectly clearly from meters away.

Is there any way to make the volume control more safe for the ears?

Any use for a sound card these days?

In the past Ive always brought dedicated sound cards for my computers, however these days most motherboards have some sort of audio support built in, in fact many even are capable of surround sound, and a large amount of the audio processing can be done completely in software anyway (eg as I understand, XAudio2, which is set to replace DirectSound does all processing in software, just using the hardware to actually send the final audio data to the speakers).

So considering those things is there actually any point to fitting a dedicated sound card in modern computers?

EDIT: So does the improved quality of dedicated audio hardware apply to software based audio solutions which seem to be becoming more popular?

What other application is using my sound card?

First off, if the answer to this is simply "you can't," I'm okay with that.

That said - in Windows 7, I open the properties of the audio out on my sound card, change the default format from 16 bit to 24 bit (or vice versa) and get this message:

... what is "another application?" Is there any way to find something, anything - the name of the file, the path to the .exe or whatever - anything that will tell me what application has a stranglehold on my sound card?

If it helps, my sound card is an external, M-Audio fast track pro, and yes, the drivers are current.

No digital audio output with Asus Xonar DG

I've purchased an Asus Xonar DG as replacement for faulty onboard audio in a Medion 8822 as it has an optical output which is all I really need to feed my HTPC.

I uninstalled the previous drivers/devices, switched the PC off, inserted the Asus card, powered up, disabled the onboard audio in the BIOS, then installed the driver that came on the CD (same version as on Asus' website as of today) and everything went perfectly - no errors.

I set the audio devices up in Windows and in the Asus utility (SPDIF enabled, 6-ch audio) as I would expect to see them work, but the only thing is I have no digital audio from test tones within Windows/the Asus utility, PCM audio or Dolby Digital from DVD. Analogue audio is fine.

I've uninstalled things and reinstalled a couple of times now, as well as trying almost all combinations of analogue/digital outputs but can't get it sorted.

Does anyone have any tips on how to get this working? This card has just been released so there isn't much out there to go on.

Notes:

• The light on the toslink port is lit.
• OS is Vista 32-bit SP2 and all up to date, pretty much a fresh install with almost no 3rd party applications installed
• This page seems to suggest that a digital output device in Windows is not needed with Xonar cards as it was with the previous Realtek so I have it set to Analog. The only other output device is S/PDIF pass-thru

How to restart audio without rebooting (USB soundcard) - the nasty case

I have a very similar problem to this: Is there a way to restart audio without restarting windows 7 computer?

I've got a USB external sound card (Line6 UX1, the older one), the OS is Windows 7 x64.

At a random moment (either when I'm playing a movie or a game) it stops completely.

Variation one: absolutely no sound when playing back anything, but I can edit/playback music without problem through the ASIO drivers (i.e. from Sound Forge).

Variation two: absolutely no sound when playing back anything, and applications using the ASIO driver do not find the external sound card. Flash player freezes all browsers (most ads are now in flash) and also iexplore.exe hungs playing the logoff sound.

I've tried almost everything: getting new drivers, disable/enable sound card through Sound menu (when I trying to disable it, it hangs forever or I cannot even access Sound menu at all!), I have tried even to disable USB management of Power options menu.

My last hope was net stop audiosrv but it went to infinite loop as well (I had enough of it after writing dots on the screen for 5 minutes).

This thing drives me crazy. My hypothesis is that an exception occurs in one of the drivers, that crashes that part of the system. If I could locate that specific process, force kill it and restart, that'd be awesome.

Edit:

I will try to check out this method next time the problem occurs (http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/312-stop-a-hung-service):

1. query the process ID of the audio service: sc queryex audiosrv
2. headshot the process dude: taskkill /f /pid [process ID]

I'll update this question if it works, and provide you a batch file.

Edit 2:

With this solution I could restart the Windows Audio service. It looked fine, until I wanted to play anything with audio. Playing goes for a second and stops (either an mp3 in a player or youtube). So the problem is nastier I thought. I'll check out the grounding issue next. Note: Soundcard still works with the ASIO drivers.

What is using my sound card?

A couple weeks ago my speakers stopped working. When I reboot, they work perfectly. But eventually some mysterious, and I suspect nefarious, piece of software takes control. (On a related note, Youtube videos seem to stop working when the speakers die). The drivers are up to date, and I ran a Malware Bytes scan and nothing came up.

I first found this question and answer: http://superuser.com/a/496589/79629

In the properties of your audio device, there should be a checkbox option labelled "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device". IIRC it is enabled by default; disabling it and rebooting should resolve your issue.

At first I thought that worked, but then the speakers stopped working again, even with that option disabled! These two screenshots were taken immediately after each other.

My next thought was to identify what was actually using the speakers. I found this second question and answer: http://superuser.com/a/253751/79629

The Volume Control application, accessible by right-clicking on the volume icon in the notification area next to your clock on the taskbar, or by running sndvol, should identify what applications are presently using your sound card.

However, it only shows me the system sounds.

Side note, Windows 8 has a hilarious tool called "Find and fix audio problems" which literally just checks if you're an idiot and have the volume muted.

How can I make Chromium use a different ALSA device?

I need one instance of Chromium on Linux to target a different sound card than the default, including Flash. Is there anyway to do this easily?

Sharing soundcard to network

Let's suppose I have a laptop (L) and desktop PC (D), both with Windows 7 onboard.

It is SB X-Fi extreme soundcard with rather good 5.1 home theater connected. But it is not comfortable to watch video sitting on the sofa from my desktop (sofa is in the center of the room and D is in the corner), even though it is 23" monitor. So I'm watching everything from the laptop.

So the question - is it possible somehow to "share" soundcard from D to L, so I will watch the video from notebook and listen the sound from the 5.1?

L and D are connected via wi-fi (fast enough).

EAX sound effects and hardware acceleration of old games under Windows Vista and Windows 7

I've read that Windows Vista and 7 stopped supporting hardware acceleration (which included support for EAX sound effects) of DirectSound/DirectX Audio. Many of the old games (most of them released in the 90's-early 2000's) that I used to play in Windows XP support hardware accelerated EAX 1 and/or 2 thru DirectSound.

I would like to know if Windows 7, with my sound card(s), can still do EAX sound effects (even without hardware acceleration) or if it can be configured to support EAX sound effects thru OpenAL in these old games.

My laptop's (old; bought ~2004) motherboard has an integrated SoundMAX sound card (SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio) while my desktop PC (bought this year; 2011) has a 'VIA High Definition Audio' sound card. Is there any software/driver I can use to enable EAX 1 and 2 sound effects (with or without hardware acceleration) in Windows 7 with these sound cards? (With Windows XP, the SoundMAX sound card was able to support EAX 1 and 2.)

Background info on this: Sound hardware acceleration was disabled in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Because of this, EAX sound effects are also disabled (unless you have a Creative-branded soundcard and install a program that can pass or convert EAX sound effects of a game to OpenAL like Creative's Alchemy).

From the Creative Alchemy webpage - http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx:

In Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to remove the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for DirectSound and DirectSound3D. The HAL is the software layer that in previous Windows operating systems enabled an audio accelerator such as the Sound Blaster X-Fi to provide DirectSound3D applications with hardware accelerated audio. This enabled soundcards to perform tasks such as sample-rate conversion, mixing, 3D spatialization using HRTFs, filtering, and effects processing. Without the HAL, DirectSound on Windows Vista will be rendered in software with no advanced functionality such as EAX.

The audio changes in Windows Vista do not affect OpenAL however. For audio cards that feature 'native' OpenAL support, such as the SB X-Fi series of cards, there is no need to worry! Games that enable support for OpenAL will continue to run just as they do on Windows XP - with hardware accelerated audio and effects. A listing of OpenAL titles can be found at http://www.openal.org/titles.html.

Although OpenAL has arguably replaced DirectSound3D, particularly in many modern PC Games (e.g. battlefield 2142, Doom3, Quake 4, Prey, etc.), there are hundreds of older PC games that support DirectSound3D and EAX technology. All of these games will sound empty and lifeless on Vista. As most DS3D games only enable 3D Audio and EAX if a hardware accelerator is present, most of these games will be reduced to a stereo output.

List of games that support EAX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_that_support_EAX
EAX, and its features on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_audio_extensions

2010-11-11 Edit - Additional Notes:

None of the old games I play show the option to enable EAX 1 & 2 effects (even if they used to in Windows XP, on the same computer and soundcard). So it appears that in my current setup, there appears to be no support for EAX 1 & 2 (even though I was able to play games with EAX 1 and/or 2 activated on the same computer and soundcard when it had Windows XP installed).

As for my laptop's motherboard (ASUS), I believe they currently have no support for enabling EAX in integrated soundcards, and I'm not sure if they are planning on implementing support. I am looking for an option that will make EAX work through software because theoretically, like CJM said, EAX 1 & 2 are fairly simple, so modern processors should have no problem with them.

Many of the old games that I play support only EAX and not OpenAL so I am missing out a lot on the sound effects of these games. The game sounds have less "life" to them without EAX. Many of the old games that I play are in this list of videogames that support EAX.