Problems with ca0106 chipset

[dpastern]

Hi Everyone,

Hoping you can assist. Several weird issues. Please note that I haven't used Linux in a number of years as an active desktop, and I'm unfamiliar with phonon and it's been a while since I've tinkered with alsa.

I have just installed Linux Mint 14 - the only distro that was able to set up grub correctly to also recognise Windows 7 on an UEFI partition on a separate SSD!

Naturally I wanted to see if I could get sound working (a no no on previous Debian installs). I have a ca0106 chipset soundcard (Creative X-fi Audigy xtreme card, PCI). When I go into KDE's control panel, I can easily enough find the sound control panel, and I can see that the ca0106 is not the default. I've made it the default, but phonon refuses to remember this. Either way, I can hear sound (Amarok, youtube) but it is chipmunked.

Since I'm very rusty, if some kind soul can tell me what they want me to post the output of, I will.

I would like to make phonon remember that the ca0106 is the default soundcard, and I would like to fix the chipmunk issue if at all possible.

Thanks in advance.

Dave

[AlbertP]

Do you use other soundcards apart from the ca0106 one? If you don't use your onboard sound, you can disable that in your BIOS.

[dpastern]

Thanks Albert. I haven't looked at the computer since my post on Saturday evening, will try and look at it tonight (bios) and disable the onboard soundcard. I think that will fix the sound chip selection issue (well, I hope), not sure if it'll fix the chipmunking. Considering that I've never had sound working at all with this soundcard (on the old PC), it's a start! Basically, I've just built a new PC to replace my Six year old rig, and some of the hardware (soundcard, graphics card) has been moved from the old PC to the new one.

I've had horrendous issues with UEFI - it seems Linux support in general is quite lacking at the moment. Was pleasantly surprised to see Linux Mint handle it with aplomb. I would have preferred to stay with Debian (perhaps Mint Debian), but I just do not think that Debian is anywhere near supporting UEFI properly. I did not try Ubuntu, but I'm not a fan of Ubuntu itself directly.

I'll update this thread later on tonight with how things go.

Dave

[AlbertP]

Onboard sound in computers has improved a lot in the past six years, so maybe you don't need your ca0106 anymore with the new computer?

[dpastern]

Thanks Albert. Disabling the onboard soundcard did the trick - I still can't select the ca0106 as the default (default hardware tab from memory), it keeps defaulting to a GF104, which I think might be the sound from the graphics card (via HDMI), which I don't use and I can't obviously turn off. But, sound does work now and work correctly. I still can't get xmms2 to work (my preferred player), it starts and then just dies. I'll test it with strace later on. I'm trying to get used to KDE4 (I never migrated to it from KDE3). I've never gotten this soundcard to work in Linux before, despite a few attempts. Pretty happy am I!

As to soundcards, the onboard card doesn't support 24bit/192khz, my audigy does. I'm a bit of a Hi Fi nut

Dave