sound problems

I’ve been having sound problems on Karmic for a while now. My audio is provided by an onboard Intel HDA ICH7 [8086:27d8]. I went through everything in:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSoundProblemsMisc

The only thing that fixes it (for just one song) is sudo alsa force-reload, which basically unloads and re-loads all related kernel modules. Will investigate further…

Notes:

1. cat /proc/asound/cards gives you a list of your sound cards
2. aplay -l does more-or-less the same
3. lsmod|grep snd lists the currently loaded kernel modules related to sound
4. lspci -vvnn|grep snd tells you which module actually controls your sound card (for me it’s snd-hda-intel)
5. look inside /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf for the options of the module above. for me they’re options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

UPDATE: Removing this last line (so my sound doesn’t go to sleep anymore) seems to have fixed it, let’s see if it’s true.

~ by azimout on October 25, 2009.