[LAU] Audigy soundcard silent after upgrade to Ubuntu Studio

[frank pirrone]

David Morrell wrote:
> frank pirrone wrote:
>   
>> David,
>>
>> Here's my /var/lib/alsa/asound.state file.  You can try moving yours 
>> aside by renaming it, and dropping this in to see if it makes any 
>> difference.  I have the Audigy2 card in this ArtistX/Ubuntu 9.10 Dell 
>> Workstation, and it is fully functional.
>>     
>
> Amazing! Eureka etc. Thanks very much indeed, Frank. I've put about 15 
> hours into this problem and you've solved it. Now the question is, how 
> did a bad asound.state file get created as a default during 
> installation? Does anyone know where I should go to alert someone who 
> can look at this?
>   
Excellent, David!  I'm delighted it worked and was that simple. 

As far as the non-functional setup goes, this card is a little flaky - I 
mean, that inconsistency in the D/A jack switch alone is illustrative of 
that.  There are a number of mutes present and countless sliders, many 
of which have unclear functions with conventional stereo output, and all 
it takes is either something to be muted - or un-muted in the case of 
that D/A jack and the particular buggy kernels - or something to be slid 
down, for there to be no sound for a given input/channel.
> Here is a comparison of the good and bad asound.state files.
>
> The replacement asound.state file has 227 controls vs 216 for the original.
>
> The following 14 switch controls existed only in the good file.
>
> The Master Playback Switch only existed in the good file. If it exists 
> on the sound card and is muted by default, there would be no sound output.
>   
Hmm, that's worse than I suggested above.  Well, maybe not.  Once you've 
executed alsamixer for the first time - and realize, this card may not 
be properly "awakened" via one of the desktop environment's GUI mixers - 
and exited, the asound.state file should be updated, but just to be 
certain, I'd execute a sudo alsactl store command.  Do a stat 
/var/lib/alsa/asound.state to see the time stamp to ensure it's a fresh 
write.

So, maybe the core code is not entirely to blame for this problem.  
There should be a post-inst script that does all this, and I believe the 
alsamixer CLI application accepts arguments to set the channel mutes and 
levels, but if any distro leaves that out - and it of course wouldn't be 
executed unless the Audigy was detected - it's going to be up to the 
desktop, or the GUI mixer app, or the user to "wake up" the card when 
first used.

Frank