Integrated audio occasionally gets index 0

[Juho Lehto]

I have Asus K8V Deluxe motherboard with integrated SoundMAX AD1980 soundcard, I have disabled it from BIOS and instead use Audigy 2 ZS. I downloaded Kubuntu 6.10 Beta a while back and I have a problem with it.

Kubuntu 6.10 seems to recognize the integrated AD1980 chip as VIA 8237, but the real problem is that often the VIA 8237 is primary sound card and I cannot get any sound out of my Audigy. I haven't found any other solution to this problem but reboot until Audigy is again the default sound card. It seems like it is totally random which audio device is the primary sound card on boot. Whether the integrated audio is disabled or enabled in BIOS does not affect this problem.

My Kubuntu 6.10 installation is a clean install, not an upgrade from 6.06. Just now I had to reboot three times to get my Audigy working, it's a bit annoying all right. :) I can say that this bug did not exist in Ubuntu 6.06, but unfortunately I haven't tried Ubuntu 6.10 or Kubuntu 6.06. I guess I can try both of them if it is really necessary, but I'd like to avoid that work if I just can. ;) Thanks.

Edit: Changed summary a bit.

[Miika Laaksonen (miika)]

I can confirm this with Dapper and onboard AC97. I have fixed the problem by adding lines:
options snd_intel8x0 index=0
options snd_ens1371 index=1
options snd_mpu401_uart index=2
to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

[total wormage (geert-bonekamp)]

i have the same problem with my VIA 8233A onboard sounddevice
i'm using kubuntu 6.10 too

[Juho Lehto (keeperb5)]

After adding following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base the problem has not occured since.

options snd-via82xx index=-2
options snd-via82cxxx_audio index=-2

[total wormage (geert-bonekamp)]

same here

[PCMan (pcman-tw)]

Confirm this bug.

I have disabled the AC97 sound chip on my GigaByte 2004 RZ main board in BIOS, and replace it with a Creative Vibra 128 card. Everything works fine under MS Windows, debian, and previous versions of ubuntu, but unfortunately, except edgy. Ubuntu edgy seems to totally omit the BIOS settings, and load the on board AC97 as the default sound card, which is extremely annoying. No matter what I do, ubuntuedgy recognizes the disabled on board AC97 as default sound device, and don't use my PCI card. This problem really drives me crazy. BTW, there is no alsaconf, so I cannot configure the sound card manually. For short, my PCI sound card works well before, but ubuntu edgy doesn't work in the right way.

Please, please fix this critical bug which makes our multi-media programs disabled before releasing ubnutu edgy. Thank you very much.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Please use the asoundconf(1) python script to set your default card. It is resistant to indices changing, which is the entire reason it was added in Dapper.

A quick walkthrough in case you're much too busy to read asoundconf(1)'s man page:

1) asoundconf list

returns a list of strings that denote human-friendly sound device identifiers (it's just filtered /proc/asound/cards).

2) asoundconf set-default-card foo

where foo is one of the strings from command (1).

3) Restart your ALSA apps. You may also need to log out and back into your graphical environment.

[Juho Lehto (keeperb5)]

The difference between Dapper and Edgy seems to be that Dapper ignores devices disabled in BIOS but Edgy doesn't. When you disable onboard audio device from BIOS, it should be ignored entirely, yet Edgy tries to use it like it is enabled. I'm not a developer but this smells like a kernel bug to me.

[Juho Lehto (keeperb5)]

In addition, I believe it is largely thanks to the default lines below "# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0" in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base that this bug does not get much more attention.