This is for a system that uses Intel HDA

$ lspci | grep Audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio
Controller (rev 03)

I got this audio system to work by the doing the following:
Remove all components of pulseaudio.
Remove alsa-base, but reinstall alsa-oss and alsa-utils, libclalsadrv1,
Further, reinstall, libsound2 and libsound2-plugins, libesdalsa0

I have not yet removed Bluetooth components - I don't have bluetooth. But
after this, I changed the sound settings a little. I changed the Capture to
OpenSoundSystem and the sound outputs to Intel HDA 268 (ALSA)

Finally, I changed adjusted the volume levels and sound works now perfectly.

The only complaint is with Virtualization. If a virtual machine is using my
sound system, I cannot use it on the host simultaneously. This is upon using
VirtualBox. But that is not a show-stopper. I rarely use Windows on Ubuntu -
only if I ever need to use Office 2007 or if I need to use googletalk to
call someone.

Thanks,
Balaji

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 1:02 AM, Balaji <email address hidden>wrote:

> Thanks a lot David et al,
>
> Daniel thanks a great deal for your inputs. Here are some of my
> observations.
>
> PulseAudio for sure does not work at all on Intel HDA. My other laptop
> which has nVIDIA HDA uses PulseAudio and I wouldn't say that sound worked
> out of the box in that either. In general, after Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), the
> ALSA driver had become quite stable. In 6.06 we still had problems and I
> could not get the driver to recognize the headphone being plugged in. But
> this retrogression in sound performance at the stage where Ubuntu is today
> is simply unacceptable. We CANNOT have a poorly working sound system for a
> machine that can perform composite management, virtualization and other
> extreme technologies that were not standard just two years back. At this
> stage of maturity, Ubuntu's choice of PulseAudio is frustrating and is also
> a very very bad choice.
>
> I don't even understand why PulseAudio needs to replicate the functionality
> of ALSA. The whole advantage of open source is that you use the work someone
> else has done and build upon it. PulseAudio should provide a sound server,
> but should not interfere with ALSA. It should use ALSA or OpenSoundSystem
> which are lower level modules. That is if at all it should exist. I don't
> even see why that project is needed.
>
> Finally, I'll try to check for all the configurations and compile a
> resolution to the problem that I found. I could finally get all sound
> functionality working fine on this laptop. But I need to think carefully as
> to what all I actually did. For sure, I completely removed PulseAudio. But
> in addition I also removed alsa-base, though not the complete alsa system.
>
> Meanwhile, let me report one more observation:
> A sound static sort of noise is heard often at bootup. This is the point
> where libsound2 is being loaded. But the static noise is irritating. I found
> that the noise is due to a couple of volume settings that are very high. I
> fixed them and rebooted and it works without the noise. Sound recording is a
> little noisy - but there could be ample ambient noise in my apartment too.
>
> Thanks,
> Balaji
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:18 AM, David Henningsson <
> <email address hidden>> wrote:
>
>> Balaji, I share your frustration over the sound system in Ubuntu. There
>> are so many components; we have OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Gstreamer, Jack
>> etc, and it is difficult to know where to start looking when things go
>> wrong. Personally I share your view about PulseAudio - that it does not
>> seem stable enough and that Ubuntu probably would be better off without
>> it at the moment. Hopefully that will change in the near future.
>>
>> But also know that almost all of us are volonteers and luckily one of
>> them (Daniel) has time to work with this issue. The best you can do at
>> the moment is to have patience and continue to help the Ubuntu project
>> in the ways that fit both you and the project (see
>> http://www.ubuntu.com/community).
>>
>> --
>> erratic elapsed time count in "sound recorder"
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/282316
>> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
>> of the bug.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Balaji
>



-- 
Balaji