How to fix multiple instance music streams with
sound card (Intel 82801I ICH9 Family) alsa sound problems on Ubuntu
11.04 GNU / Linux
The
Ubuntu Linux installed previously on Acer ASPIRE 5736Z on my
sisters notebook works quite fine. However today she complained
about an issue with her sound. The explanation of the problem she
faced is:
When she plays a
movie file and pauses it and then switches
to a
music player, suddenly the notebook sound disappears
completely until she restarts all the running problems using the
sound server. The
Acer Aspire is used with a
GNOME
Desktop, hence my bet was the issues are most probably caused by
some kind of mess happening inside Pulseaudio or the way
Alsa loaded kernel drivers handles the multiple sound
channel streams.
I'm using GNU / Linux for more than 11 years now and I have faced
the same sound issues so many times, so when I heard about the
problem I thought its pretty normal.
Anyways, what was really irritating in these situation is that when
her laptop sound disappears all videos with a video or sound files
which are to be played by Mozilla Firefox Browser or Chrome are
also gone.
This causes big issues, especially taking in consideration the fact
that she had no idea about computers and is a GUI Desktop user, who
have no idea how to restart the pulseaudio server to fix the
problem etc.
As a good brother, I took the time to check about the issues
related to the specific model of Audio Module Hardware / Sound
Card, first I checked the exact model of audio the Acer
Aspire 5736Z is equipped with:
stanimiraaaa@Ubuntu-Aspire-5736Z:~$ lspci |grep -i
audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD
Audio Controller (rev 03)
I checked about any reported other users issues on the net and I
found a user somewhere (lost the link), complaining he is
experiencing the same sound oddities on his Acer ASPIRE
The fix he suggested is actually quite simple and comes to adding a
simple line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf :
stabunura@Ubuntu-Aspire-5736Z:~$ sudo su -
[sudo] password for stanimiraaaa:
root@Ubuntu-Aspire-5736Z:~# echo 'options snd_hda_intel model=auto'
>> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
Next I restartarted to make the new settings take, affect. Its also
possible to do it without restart, by unloading and loading the
alsa module but I'm a lazy kind of person and the machine is
notable unimportant so why should I bother ;)
One important note here is that I removed also an .asoundrc file,
that I created some long time ago and this file might have been
creating also some sound issues, the content of ~/.asoundrc, before
I delete it in her home user, was like so:
stabunura@Ubuntu-Aspire-5736Z:~$ cat ~/.asoundrc
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
device 0
}
ctl.!default { type hw
card 1
device 0
}
Doing this minor changes to the Ubuntu system erradicated the sound
problems and now the sound with simultaneous sound streams works
just perfect! Thx God ;)