December 10, 2018

Fedora - The nightmare of linux sound

Over the years, I have fought many battles with the linux sound system. I have lost all of them. The one thing I have learned is that, if it works out of the box great. Otherwise, find a USB dongle and make do with that.

My current problems are with a Gigabyte "Sniper 3" motherboard with some kind of sound system on the motherboard. This has worked on and off over the years, and is currently in the fairly usual "not working state". A good lesson learned here is as follows: do not buy a gamer oriented motherboard and expect to use it on linux. This would probably be a fine product if I wanted to run Windows and play games, but I don't. Gigabyte does make good hardware, and this hardware has been solid, it is the linux sound support that has been shabby.

It worked nicely for quite a while under Fedora 27, then mysteriously stopped working. I have tried a variety of things, while avoiding any time wasted troubleshooting the current set up. I burned a Linux 29 live CD and checked if I could play a Youtube Video. I dug up an old Fedora 25 live DVD and tried that as well, with no luck.

Use a USB dongle

While I am in a bad mood, I may as well grumble about USB connectors. Whoever designed these rectangular connectors was/is an imbecile and deserves to be shot. It is always a game of russian roulette with a two cylinder revolver to try to plug one of these things in.

Not wanting to waste additional time, I dug around in my box of USB cables and gadgets and located a USB sound dongle I bought several years ago. It is marked "SIIG USB SoundWave 7.1 V2.0". I plug the cord to my speakers into the 1/8 inch jack on the dongle and plug it into a USB 3.0 receptacle on my case. No sound yet. I am running XFCE, so I visit the Applications menu and find two entries of interest under "Multimedia".

The first (labeled "Audio Mixer") proves to be useless. It has a prominent menu labeled "Sound Card" that offers me either "HDA Intel PCH" or "Audio Advantage Microll". Neither setting produces sound. Both indicate "Alsa mixer" in parenthesis, whatever that means.

The other turns out to be the trick. It is labeled "PulseAudio Volume Control". I'll swear that this offered me a choice when I first opened it up, but now it seems locked onto "CM102-A+/102S+ Audio Controller, which seems to work. This is just the kind of irreproducable rubbish we have learned to expect from the linux sound system, so why am I surprised? I had to switch from the HDA Intel PCH here originally to make sound come alive. More mysteries, but it is working, but who knows for how long!

Just for the record, I will note that when I plug in this USB dongle, I see the following in /var/log/messages: 

Dec 10 17:08:41 trona kernel: usb 3-1: new full-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
Dec 10 17:08:42 trona kernel: usb 3-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0d8c, idProduct=0103, bcdDevice= 0.10
Dec 10 17:08:42 trona kernel: usb 3-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Dec 10 17:08:42 trona kernel: usb 3-1: Product: USB Sound Device
Dec 10 17:08:42 trona kernel: usb 3-1: Manufacturer: C-Media INC.
Dec 10 17:08:42 trona kernel: usb 3-1: set volume quirk for CM102-A+/102S+

The rest of the story

The next day, guess what? Sound is no longer working. The fix is as follows: Before this exercise the Pulse Audio thing still has the CM102 selected, but nothing is working. After the replug, it reverts back to the on-board sound system, which never works, so you have to switch it back to CM102 again. It remains to be seen how often this nonsense happens.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org