[hardy] [alsa/dmix] DMIX not working

[Zenigata]

Since a few days before gutsy public release, I noticed that I was unable to listen to a sound (with xmms or a video player) and watch a flash animation with nspluginwrapper under Firefox.

At first I thought it was due to nspluginwrapper, but now I noticed that I was unable to play sound with two different apps at the same time, evan thought alsa seems to be correctly set to use DMIX.

I am using the amd 64 version of gutsy, with the intek-hda driver for a sound card based on ALC 861.

I used to be able to play differents sounds with alsa before.

--
Z.

[Olaf Piesche (opiesche)]

I've had trouble getting dmix and 5.1 surround sound to work for the longest time on my nForce4 based onboard sound card. Changing .asoundrc to the attached file finally fixed it.
I'd actually suggest a graphical utility to set up the .asoundrc file, as it was a bit of trial and error at first to figure out how to setup the routing tables correctly - mainly because documentation on .asoundrc is sparse. What I finally ended up doing was running speaker-test -c6 repeatedly, figuring out which route destination corresponded to which speaker hooked up to my computer, and setting up the routes one by one.
A utility to do this would be nice. Also, if the installer could choose from a set of routing tables and dmix configurations for recognized sound cards, and build .asoundrc correspondingly, most of the problems people are having with getting dmixed surround sound out of the box may be eliminated...

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please add the output requested in the Reporting Sound Bugs section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems as separate attachments? Thanks in advance.

[Olaf Piesche (opiesche)]

Certainly. Here's the requested output:

[Olaf Piesche (opiesche)]

lspci -vnnn:

[Olaf Piesche (opiesche)]

dpkg -s linux-ubuntu-modules:

[Olaf Piesche (opiesche)]

output from alsa-info.sh is at

http://pastebin.ca/1081494

[Olaf Piesche (opiesche)]

Please note also that I had to increase the period_size significantly from the default in order to get Flash audio to play without or with only minimal stuttering.