Ubuntu
alsa-driver package

  1. Bug #192382
  2. Comment #105

Comment 105 for bug 192382

Revision history for this message
Bruce H. McCosar (bmccosar) wrote :

Greetings, everyone. I'm new to Launchpad, so I hope I'm not doing something incorrectly here.

I have a decent amount of experience with Linux, going back to my original Debian distro. I've custom compiled kernels before, and even built Linux from Scratch.

I switched to Ubuntu because of the amount of time I was spending configuring and reconfiguring audio. The ubuntu-studios packages fixed a lot of that.

Unfortunately, today, I'm back to square one. I have a new computer (my old one died recently), an HP Pavilion m8530f (amd 64, 5Gb mem). The sound card seems to be an intel hda with the ALC883 chip above.

I have followed many of the recommendations above, but the result is always the same -- the sound works, but is massively clipped, and echoes as if fifteen different processes were sending sound to the card at once. That is, if I play a sound file of a single tone, for example "aaaahhh", it sounds like "AACK!zzztAACK!zzt!AACK!zzzt!aack!zz!aack!zz!aak!" The output is choppy, I guess you could say.

Following available directions, I custom compiled the alsa modules on a testbed partition (/dev/sda2, not my main Ubuntu, but one I use to try out dumb things before I blow up the system I rely on). Despite successful compilation, install, reboot, and lsmod analysis, the sound still did exactly the same thing.

In the end, I gave up and bought an Edirol UA-4FX. (Thank you, usb_audio developers!)

Nevertheless, it's still a problem. I think I could get the latency on the system down to a bare minimum if I could use the on-board sound card.

Now. Since I've never done this before -- bug reporting here on Launchpad -- I'm kind of at square one. What do I report? What module information, hardware information, and so on do you need?

P.S. I've also installed Intrepid on my testbed partition in both the amd64 and i386 flavors (i386 is the current version, as of last night). Although everything else works faultlessly, the sound remains clobbered. A serious bug, since I'm a musician ;-)

Thanks for any help or advice you can give me.