Something's killed my sound [solved]

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-09 03:00

I've been trying to set up a virtual wifi access point on my Athlon XP 2000+ (1 GiB RAM, antiX 13.2 32-bit, Testing), and my onboard sound, which was working, now is not. I'm not sure when it quit, but I've been pounding away at this wifi setup all weekend. Now, I have no sound, the speaker icon doesn't appear, while the sound test and mixer buttons in Control Centre give a blank terminal window that closes again almost immediately -- this is exactly like what I had in the laptop when it wouldn't recognize the USB sound device (or before I had it, when the only sound hardware was a chipset that has never had a Linux driver).

First thing I tried was restarting; there was an error message about saving ALSA settings during shutdown, and another about being unable to load something ALSA related during restart. Unfortunately, both messages scrolled off too rapidly to read any detail beyond recognizing ALSA on the line, and I haven't found the correct log file to locate the messages.

I presume I touched something I shouldn't have while trying to get wifi working -- which I'm pursuing on another forum now. How do I find out what and correct it?

fatmac · posted: 2013-12-09 08:48

See if it shows in dmesg.

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dmesg | less

For alsa, once set up again, run

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sudo alsactl save

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-09 11:54

fatmac wrote:See if it shows in dmesg.
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dmesg | less
For alsa, once set up again, run
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sudo alsactl save

Running demsg | less got (END) in an otherwise empty terminal. __{{emoticon}}__

fatmac · posted: 2013-12-09 19:00

dmesg | less
not
demsg | less
__{{emoticon}}__

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-10 00:47

Wow, that was a lot of stuff, all apparently generated before the ALSA related message came up. __{{emoticon}}__ I'd paste it, but I'm pretty sure it would exceed this board's message size limit.

jdmeaux1952 · posted: 2013-12-10 03:01

Look for any ERROR messages to repost.

fatmac · posted: 2013-12-10 07:46

Try

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dmesg | grep alsa

or maybe

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dmesg | grep sound

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-10 11:18

Yep, tried dmesg | grep alsa, got nothing. And now we may never know; I made some minor change to the network or hostapd file, and now the sound is back (it wasn't just the reboot, I restarted at least three times without regaining sound).

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-12 03:01

And now it's gone again. For whatever it's worth, it almost seems as if the sound goes when I get the wifi broadcasting or into master mode, though I can't fathom how those two could interact; on this machine (ten years old or so), the sound is an on-board six-stack, while the wifi is a USB dongle on an extension wire. I've seen the ALSA error message go by enough times, though, that I've picked up that the end of it is"no sound cards detected" or something very like that; I know my sound hardware is visible and enabled (just had to reset my BIOS settings; yesterday's power failure convinced me I've got a bad CMOS battery -- lithium or rechargeable, ten years is a long time for a little cell; I hope it's a replaceable one!), and this hardware has worked in the past. I'll past my lspci below, I'm not sure what else might be of help.

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00:00.0 Host bridge: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 IGP2 (rev c1)
00:00.1 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 1 (rev c1)
00:00.2 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 4 (rev c1)
00:00.3 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 3 (rev c1)
00:00.4 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 2 (rev c1)
00:00.5 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 Memory Controller 5 (rev c1)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 ISA Bridge (rev a3)
00:01.1 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 SMBus (MCP) (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:02.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:02.2 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:04.0 Ethernet controller: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 Ethernet Controller (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 External PCI Bridge (rev a3)
00:09.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 IDE (rev a2)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation nForce2 AGP (rev c1)
01:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8738/CMI8768 PCI Audio (rev 10)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1)

rokytnji · posted: 2013-12-12 03:04

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url was:"http://www.mariusv.com/cannot-open-alsamixer/"
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url was:"http://steamcommunity.com/app/24420/discussions/0/810919691155218006/"
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Worked for me.

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-12 04:01

rokytnji wrote:
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This is definitely not the error I'm getting; it's something about can't load something from a file (or save to a file) and"no sound cards detected".

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I was referred to this for my laptop sound, too -- never tried it there because I found the USB being prevented from loading first (hence loading at all, since it's the only detected sound on that system) an corrected that. I haven't restarted yet, but I don't think this is the issue -- I just tried to restart alsa to load this setting change; every single module failed to unload, then the reload hung at the end of the module list. I open process viewer and I see mutliple copies of some of the alsa startup command lines -- I doubt that's supposed to happen. I saw this before, and tried BIOS disabling the CM97 Audio hardware (which I think is part of a voice modem), but that changed nothing; I've also changed the CMI8738 from four channel to six (also no change).

Edit: Well, after a restart, my sound is back, but I don't know if adding an explicit drivers = alsa to [/]etc/openal/alsoft.conf made any difference; the sound has come and gone a few times. I'll try to remember to report back here after a few more restarts.

fatmac · posted: 2013-12-12 09:55

Replace your cmos battery - it can affect a few things.

I've had a problem on one laptop with sound & wifi using the same IRQ, I had sound until I tried using wifi, when i tried to use sound again it froze. I swapped my wifi card for a different make, & all was well

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-12 12:05

Hmmm. An IRQ conflict could prevent detecting the sound chipset at the critical part of startup, and then resolve later to let the sound hardware show in lspci. Some of my IRQs (if not most) are dynamic -- that is, they can be reconfigured by BIOS during startup, before BIOS even looks for an OS -- and that takes place before anything checks what's on the USB, also, but I do note that networking now goes through a string of messages (setting up the WAP) before ALSA starts. I'll have to dig around in the settings to see if I can hard-code some of the IRQs to ensure USB and sound aren't sharing.

Silent Observer · posted: 2013-12-15 23:54

Well, this popped up on my laptop today; it did it immediately after I configuered xscreensaver and set its daemon to start on boot; restarted after that, and no sound. No clue why configuring the screen saver and/or starting its daemon would affect sound in any way; might have been a coincidence (the laptop had been up for four days plus by that point). The fix above (involving alsoft.conf), coupled with rerunning
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on the laptop (so I could hear the music in gjeweled) restored it and it's held through a couple more restarts, so I think it's good; I'm going to call this solved.