simple audio fix

Well, listen here

Turns out I had a problem with my onboard sound card (via chipset) conflicting with my Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Gamer 5.1 sound card. The quick and easy fix? Here's what I had to do:

Show all sound modules currently enabled

> lsmod|grep snd

and in my case, I knew I wanted to turn off anything to do with via. So I looked on the left side for snd_[whatever via] and made a note of it. What is on the right side isn't important, even if you see via on that side.

snd_emu10k1 81668 1
snd_rawmidi 22944 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_seq_device 8332 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec 64608 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_pcm_oss 47652 0
snd_mixer_oss 16768 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 84872 3 snd_emu10k1,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 23300 1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 9604 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_via82xx [someNumber] [somethingElse]
snd_util_mem 4608 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep 9220 1 snd_emu10k1
snd 50276 11 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_hwdep
soundcore 9824 1 snd

I make a note of snd_via82xx because I want to add that to the system's blacklist. Open up blacklist with editing privileges:

> sudo emacs /etc/hotplug/blacklist

And somewhere at the bottom should be the snd_ section. Simply add whichever module you want blacklisted and it will no longer load at system restart. That allows the other sound card, my SB Live! 5.1 to work without the sound being disabled.

A point to note, this enables the dsp channel of the system. Only one program at a time can use this channel, wheres the alsa works any way. At least that's my understanding.

To see what is using the alsa channel:

> lsof /dev/snd/*

and to see what is using the dsp channel:

> lsof /dev/dsp

One last thing, codecs. You'll want to install audio and/or video codecs now that you've got your soundcard working. The codecs section of the Ubuntu guide suggests the following steps. However, you can search for the packages through Kynaptic just as well. Through kynaptic you don't have to do the gst-register step:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-lame
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install w32codecs
sudo apt-get install libdivx4linux
sudo apt-get install lame
sudo apt-get install sox
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install mjpegtools
sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
gst-register-0.8

-Audio goodness