Audio Cracking / Popping - Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30

[iriches]

Hi All,

I've just installed Mint 8 on my machine with a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card. A bit of searching on this board suggested that doing a "lspci" was a good idea, and once I figured out how to do that, it came back with:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400/KT600 AGP] Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 PCI Bridge
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
00:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306 Fire II IEEE 1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller (rev 46)
00:0b.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
00:0b.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
00:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] (rev 01)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc R420 JP [Radeon X800XT]
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc R420 [X800XT-PE] (Secondary)

I'm guessing the bit I've put in red is relevant, but left it all there in case it's a conflict with something else on the list.

What happens is that the audio is very erratic. It can be fine - but then it will disappear, go crackly, start humming etc. This is on playback of audio files (only tested wma so far), playing DVDs, or even just changing the volume level from the little icon in the bottom right of the screen.

Any clues for a newbie? I did a forum search on "Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30", but the resulting thread (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 30#p124985) didn't seem to exactly mirror my problem, and I'm afraid the answer was not exactly comprehensible to me.

Can anyone else help?

Thanks!

Ian

[Husse]

I'm afraid that the link you have found is the solution, only you have to get alsa-driver 1.0.22.1 instead
For an explanation of "Select All" see here - sorry if it's obvious to you
For some reason the support for the Cirrus Logic card in the kernel disappeared a year ago or so
So you do

Code: Select all

sudo su

Code: Select all

wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.22.1.tar.bz2

Code: Select all

tar xf alsa-driver-1.0.22.1.tar.bz2

Code: Select all

rm alsa-driver-1.0.22.1.tar.bz2

Code: Select all

cd alsa-driver-1.0.22.1/

After that, beginning with ./configure it's the same as in the other topic
Just copy to the terminal (explanation here) just in case
You should not encounter any problems and hopefully you get proper sound
Due to the rather specific "nature" of this sound card there is no simple solution

[iriches]

Many thanks for the reply. I'm not sure I understand it all...but I'll give it a go and post back here if/when I get stuck!

[Husse]

Copy the commands from the post and execute one at a time (in the terminal)
The devil is in the details so please copy - do not type

[iriches]

Many thanks. The sound seems to be a lot better - but not perfect. I'm not sure if all went according to plan. I copied and pasted rather than typing, but starting with the "make" command, error messaged were appearing, e.g. the latter part of the output from make was:

patch -p0 -i pcm.patch pcm.h
make[4]: patch: Command not found
make[4]: *** [pcm.h] Error 127
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/ian/alsa-driver-1.0.22.1/include/sound'
make[3]: *** [prepare] Error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/ian/alsa-driver-1.0.22.1/include/sound'
make[2]: *** [prepare] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/ian/alsa-driver-1.0.22.1/include'
make[1]: *** [dep] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ian/alsa-driver-1.0.22.1'
make: *** [include/sndversions.h] Error 2

Some of the output of "make install" was:

cp: cannot stat `snd-page-alloc.ko': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `snd-pcm.ko': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `snd-rawmidi.ko': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `snd-timer.ko': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `snd.ko': No such file or directory
make[1]: *** [modules_install] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ian/alsa-driver-1.0.22.1/acore'
make: *** [install-modules] Error 1

The entire output of "modprobe snd-cs46xx" was:

WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-page-alloc.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-timer.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/ac97_bus.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/pci/ac97/snd-ac97-codec.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-device.ko': No such file or directory
WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-rawmidi.ko': No such file or directory
FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.31-14-generic/kernel/sound/pci/cs46xx/snd-cs46xx.ko': No such file or directory

"FATAL" does not sound good?

Anyway...the sound seems better, and it will actually play a sound or movie OK now, until I play with the main volume control in the bottom right of the desktop, at which point everything goes crackly again!

Thanks for the help, and if you can see anything obviously wrong in what I did, please let me know.

[iriches]

Hmmm. Something's definitely wrong. I've no sound at all after a reboot. Thinking the sound may have got muted again, I tried:

sudo alsamixer

and got:

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory

Any help?

[iriches]

OK...sorry to keep adding to the thread...but I've sorta sorted this. My problems above have been solved. I read through closely the output from my seemingly failed attempts to install the correct driver-thingy, and saw that it was first failing at the "patch" command. A bit of googling suggested that the "patch" command may not be installed as standard, and thus I looked for it and installed it through package manager.

The install process then went well!

However....

The sound is maybe a little better, but still seems to very easily break-up - especially if I move the volume control at the bottom right of my screen. When the sound does break up, tweaking the volume control a bit will often bring it back.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks!

[Husse]

Sorry this is an old piece of hardware
First now I realize that I forgot to mention that you should install build-essential (apt install build-essential ) but you fixed that on your own

[iriches]

Thanks for your help. I've done some more Googling, and it looks like there's nothing I can do to make this hardware work. There are a number of bugs related to the CS46XX cards in the latest Ubuntu distribution on which (as I understand it) MINT 8 is based:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/428619
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/483932
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/445097

[Husse]

Can you still get Windows drivers for it? Just curious

[iriches]

Can you still get Windows drivers for it? Just curious

Last official drivers from Turtle Beach were for XP. Apparently it can be made to work in Vista and Win 7 (e.g. http://www.jonathanjungman.com/blog/pos ... -Card.aspx)

My system is an XP / Mint 8 dual boot at present - so I can't personally vouch for its Windows compatibility in anything other than XP!