I've screwed up my audio set up. Can someone help?

[kaktus]

Hi,

I saw reference to using oss4 in place of alsa - better sound claimed. So, I followed advice to install OSS4 here:

http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/installing ... risquel-40

I am not blaming the advice given which I imagine is sound, but I've messed up somewhere along the way. Having not succeeded in getting oss4 working, I no longer could use alsa. I tried reversing the instructions, but I can no longer see my usb soundcard (EMU 0404) which used to work with no problems. I tried reinstalling alsa. I tried removing, then reinstalling Pulseaudio.

Currently:

1. In control centre, Sounds - no device is mentioned for hardware, input and output.
2. In Deadbeef the alsa output plugin is selected under preferences, sound. Ouput device set to 'default'.
3. When I tried to access alsa mixer through Gmerlin mixer, I get an error message: 'Could not find any alsa mixers. Check your setup!'
4. Tried feeling my way round and when I tried to reload alsa from Terminal I get:

mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/run/alsa': Permission denied
/sbin/alsa: Warning: Failed to create /var/run/alsa/.
/sbin/alsa: Warning: Not keeping list of removed modules because /var/run/alsa is absent.
It will not be possible automatically to reload these modules.
Unloading ALSA sound driver modules: (none loaded).
mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/run/alsa': Permission denied
Loading ALSA sound driver modules: (none to reload).

System profiler indicates:

USB devices - nothing shown
Multimedia entry in Summary, Audio Adapter: (null)

Instead of continuing to feel my way in the dark, could someone put me right on how to put right my sound setup.

thanks

[MrBob22]

Not sure I can give you a quick answer on this given all the variables.

You tried to load OSS4 as I understand it in place of ALSA. I believe this install does things like delete ALSA components and it may also blacklist ALSA modules so they wont load.
Anyway, you are now wanting to go back to ALSA but its not working. From your post, it looks like an install of ALSA failed.

What computer and cpu are you using? What version of Mint? Do you have drivers for the sound card?

I am away from my desktop, so I cant look this up. I would try to reload the sound with Synaptic Package manager and see if that will get your missing items back. In the Ubuntu documentation, there are some steps listed to revert from OSSx back to ALSA, but this is complicated and the documents go back a few years (so might need to be tweaked) to work correctly. That is why I would try the package managers first.

Will check back again later. MrBob22

[kaktus]

thanks for replying MrBob22. I'm not sure which part of what I've done has worked, but after rebooting, my usb soundcard is working again . I don't mind 'messing up' my linux setup, since as a newcomer to linux, it gives me a chance to learn more when finding a solution. But, got to say, in this case, I'm not sure what I've learned as I resorted to my scattergun approach in the hope that I stumbled across a solution. And it worked, lol.

Thanks again for your reponse.

[MrBob22]

Hey, glad things are up and running. I use Windows 7, mac ipad, Ubuntu and Mint and I have found the Linux folks to be great helps. So, I feel the need to give back, so to speak.