/proc/asound/cards reports 0 [rev20 ]:VIA686A -VIA 82C686A/B rev20 VIA 82C686A/B rev20 at 0xac00, irq 11 1 [UA100 ]: USB-Audio - UA-100 Roland UA-100 at usb-00:07.2-2 So it looks like something is seen but how do I get aplay to play to the UA-100? The VIA card has alway's reported itself but neither windows, linux or anything else has ever got any life out of it! so do I use the aplay to select the card even thou, aplay -l doesn't list it? Chris Chris Lyon wrote:

I'm sorry that I've obviously phrased this question all wrong. so I'll try to be a little bit more detailed this time. I have now installed Mandrake 10.1 on the machine. and now aplay -l does indeed report the existance of UA-100 card kscd shows all the typical signs of playing a cd, it lists tracks, it starts counting when play is pressed, But no sound emerges. amixer reports no mixer elements, or nothing. /proc/asound/cards displays an endless stream of 0 [UA100 ]: USB-Audio - UA - 100 Roland UA - 100 at usb-0000:00:07.2 - 2, full speed

if I try to select a Device with aplay -D= ***** nothing I type in seems to make any sense to it. if I try to list pcm devices to plug into the above line with aplay -D the results are to say the least incomprehensable.

Where do I go next? This used to work when I installed 9.2 originally but I have been poking & proding for 4 days now and It still desn't work. ONce again I apologies for the way I present my questions but I am NOT pestering before trying, I am on a last ditch attempt to play a CD on a linux box. I won't bore you with my background, but I have a little involvement in the synth, computing and audio field and yet this is now getting way beyond a joke. I have had this playing with Micheal Minns MMUSAUDIO . However ALSA seems the way to go for all things Audio and Linux. So how do you check the signal path in a system? and what do you do if a device appears not to be supported by the mixing facilities?

Chris, Sorry that you haven't gotten many answers to this question. Let me take a shot at it. I'm not promising much. 1) If you get an endless list of devices showing up in /proc/asound/cards then clearly something is very, very wrong. I think that it's hardly worth proceeding further until this gets sorted out, but unfortunately I've never used a USB audio device so I Cannot help there. 2) Try alsaplayer. I'm not clear if this machine is a desktop or a laptop. If it was an old style desktop and you were trying to play an audio CD then you would normally do this through an audio cable hooked to the sound card. However, since your sound card (working or not) is a USB device you obviously cannot do this. To get around this issue you need to use a CD player that will play the audio digitally across the PCI bus. IIRC xmms will not do this, or at least not without special plugins. alsaplayer will. Since your sound card (working or not) is at the end of a USB cable you need to make sure you are using a player that can communicate. Try alsaplayer. 3) alsamixer doesn't work with all sound cards/devices, and I'm not sure it works with this one. amixer may or may not, I'm not sure. You could be having trouble simply because the sound card is muted and will stay that way until you find the right mixer. As you said this originally I see you understand the problem. We need someone with more USB experience to pony up the appropriate info. Again, I wish I could offer more help. I think it's disappointing that you've written 3 messages and received no public responses. I hope you got more help privately. With best regards, Mark Chris Lyon wrote: