ALSA Devices No Longer Work

[kevinmint]

A couple weeks ago I powered down my music editing computer. Everything had been working fine with it for a long time at that point. Today, not so much. I captured the output of alsa-info at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BOas2y ... sp=sharing. The obvious error, at the end, is that aplay and arecord don't come up with anything. But, the "Soundcards recognized by ALSA" section looks right, as does the "PCI Soundcards installed in the system".

Why might aplay -l and arecord -l just hang like that?

Thanks people.

P.S.: Is there a version of alsa-info that doesn't use ncurses?

[MrEen]

Hi kevinmint,

The script itself didn't complete for some reason. Run this one instead which will give twice as much info, but uploads only:

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curl https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/raw/master/src/utils/pa-info?inline=false | bash | nc termbin.com 9999

EDIT: I forgot to mention that neither PulseAudio nor JACK were running, which is more likely the source of your issue. But the big output might help us figure why they weren't running.

[kevinmint]

Hi Mr Een,

I tried your pa-info tip. The results are here https://termbin.com/fyqu. Just as with the alsa-info script, aplay -l seems to hang. I wonder if that's the aplay response when it can't find any ALSA devices, or when it finds them, but can't communicate with them? That's just conjecture on my part tho.

Thanks....

[kevinmint]

A warm (already powered on and running) reboot got aplay -l and arecord -l to list my ALSA devices.

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**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: M1010 [M Audio Delta 1010], device 0: ICE1712 multi [ICE1712 multi]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC888 Digital [ALC888 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: M1010_1 [M Audio Delta 1010], device 0: ICE1712 multi [ICE1712 multi]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  
  **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: M1010 [M Audio Delta 1010], device 0: ICE1712 multi [ICE1712 multi]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC888 Analog [ALC888 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Intel [HDA Intel], device 2: ALC888 Alt Analog [ALC888 Alt Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: M1010_1 [M Audio Delta 1010], device 0: ICE1712 multi [ICE1712 multi]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  

This is a bit different than it was before the trouble started. The on-board HDA Intel device used to be card 0, and the two Delta 1010 devices were cards 1 and 2. If I knew what could cause that, then maybe it would point to something useful in getting this to work all the time again?

Now I'll see if I can get audio signals to be captured and played by either card.

[MrEen]

Weird. That script should have also provided the alsa-info input, but stopped at the very point it should have started that section.

This is starting to sound like ALSA itself is stopping or something. You could try sudo alsa force-reload or sudo alsactl init to see if they do anything.

If still struggling after trying the above, let's see this output please:

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dmesg | grep -C1 -E 'ALSA|HDA|sof|HDMI|snd[_-]|sound|hda.codec|hda.intel'

[kevinmint]

It's interesting that the dmesg and grep commands find only the on-board sound device, but neither of the other sound cards.

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[    1.024688] Freeing initrd memory: 60360K
[    1.024694] PCI-DMA: Using software bounce buffering for IO (SWIOTLB)
[    1.024695] software IO TLB: mapped [mem 0xcbfb0000-0xcffb0000] (64MB)
[    1.024903] Scanning for low memory corruption every 60 seconds
--
[    4.320017] raid6: using ssse3x2 recovery algorithm
[    4.323413] xor: measuring software checksum speed
[    4.333012]    prefetch64-sse: 12140.000 MB/sec
--
[   28.560169] intel_powerclamp: No package C-state available
[   28.562343] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0: autoconfig for ALC888: line_outs=4 (0x14/0x15/0x16/0x17/0x0) type:line
[   28.562345] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:    speaker_outs=0 (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
[   28.562347] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:    hp_outs=1 (0x1b/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
[   28.562348] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:    mono: mono_out=0x0
[   28.562349] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:    dig-out=0x1e/0x0
[   28.562350] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:    inputs:
[   28.562352] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:      Front Mic=0x19
[   28.562353] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:      Rear Mic=0x18
[   28.562354] snd_hda_codec_realtek hdaudioC1D0:      Line=0x1a
[   28.578276] intel_powerclamp: No package C-state available
[   28.578746] input: HDA Intel Front Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input6
[   28.578848] input: HDA Intel Rear Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input7
[   28.578969] input: HDA Intel Line as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input8
[   28.579057] input: HDA Intel Line Out Front as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input9
[   28.579157] input: HDA Intel Line Out Surround as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input10
[   28.579240] input: HDA Intel Line Out CLFE as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input11
[   28.579293] input: HDA Intel Line Out Side as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input12
[   28.580050] input: HDA Intel Front Headphone as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card1/input13
[   28.947186] EXT4-fs (sdh1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: errors=remount-ro

Thanks for the assist!

[MrEen]

Well, let's see if this changes that:

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sudo modprobe snd-ice1712

Whoops, nevermind. It's already loaded based on your alsa-info.sh output.

Maybe install alsa-tools-gui so you can run envy24control and see if something there might help? I have no experience with those cards, so can't offer much about what to look for or anything really.