Sound on Ubuntu Studio

cornbb

Hi guys, first post here in the Unix forum but I'm sure it won't be my last

I've installed Ubuntu Studio on my Dell laptop and have been pleasantly surprised at how smooth and enjoyable the whole experience has been so far (compared to my last experience with Fedora 4 )

One small teething problem: I'm using an external USB soundcard - an Edirol UA-25 in case anyone is interested. Its supported by Linux's ALSA driver and indeed is working fine for YouTube vids, system notifications and MP3 playback. However some apps (notably Movie Player and VLC) still insist on using my laptop's onboard crappy soundcard (an Intel chipset if I remember correctly).

Querying the following:

asoundconf list

gives me

Names of available sound cards:
ICH6
UA25

So I used

asoundconf set-default-card AU25

without any error messages. However running VLC from the terminal gives me the following warnings:

VLC media player 0.8.6 Janus
ALSA lib confmisc.c:670:(snd_func_card_driver) cannot find card 'AU25'
ALSA lib conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such device
ALSA lib confmisc.c:391:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such device
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1070:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:3500:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such device
ALSA lib conf.c:3968:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such device
ALSA lib pcm.c:2145:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default
[00000280] main playlist: stopping playback

and I hear sound from my onboard crappy soundcard instead of my fancy UA25.

Anyone got any pointers? Cheers!

ethernet

What if you disable onboard sound altogether so that Studio will [hopefully] default to the external card? Have a poke in your BIOS. Watch for the onscreen message to hit Del of Fx when you boot up.

Have you set the external device as the default in Ubuntu's admin settings?

cornbb

Thanks for the reply.

ethernet wrote:

What if you disable onboard sound altogether so that Studio will [hopefully] default to the external card? Have a poke in your BIOS. Watch for the onscreen message to hit Del of Fx when you boot up.

Hmm no luck I'm afraid, my BIOS doesn't seem to offer that option.

[/quote]Have you set the external device as the default in Ubuntu's admin settings?[/QUOTE]
The only UI option to configure this would be Under System->Preferences->Sound. I set everything here to USB Audio and the test tones play through my external soundcard fine. But certain apps are still using onboard sound or playing nothing at all

ressem

Just a stab in the dark, but looks like you've typoed UA25 as AU25 in your reply below. You get the same result with
asoundconf set-default-card UA25

instead?

cornbb

/smacks self on head

So I did - but I tried that with the correct spelling and still having problems. I've hacked all the alsa and various other sound modules to bits now after following numerous online hints/tutorials/fixes so I think I might just try reinstalling the whole alsa package now

pid()

The latest version of alsa that ubuntu has installed did not work with my sound card at all. I had to install the beta version and all is well now. I'm just wondering if you have to do the same thing. Might be worth a shot.

cornbb

pid() wrote:

The latest version of alsa that ubuntu has installed did not work with my sound card at all. I had to install the beta version and all is well now. I'm just wondering if you have to do the same thing. Might be worth a shot.

The card is well supported by alsa alright, there's a fairly good article on using/configuring it here: http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Edirol_UA-25. But that may well be worth a shot alright.

However I think I've made shít of my various audio settings by messing around with them, not knowing what was going on. I'm tempted to start from scratch again...