Latest Nvidia GPU and ALSA

[MyWorld]

If you have a recent GPU, then you will no doubt be aware of the fact that Nvidia, and I would assume ATI, now feature HDMI sound on the GPU, making for a bit of a mess in Linux.

I just today upgrade form my old 8800GT to a brand spanking new second hand card, 550TI.

This threw my sound for a loop and left me without any sound at all. Information on this subject is not that readily available.
On Arch Linux I was now presented with two "sound devices", the Nvidia HDMI sound and Creative Audigy.

Alsa and Pulse defaults to the Nvidia device and no matter of GUI tinkering would resolve the sound issue. So for those who might have the same issue, the solution to my predicament was rather simple, just blacklist the Nvidia module.

To see what you are up against:

cat /proc/asound/cards

If you are in the same boat as me you would have noticed two or more devices.

cat /proc/asound/modules

This will tell you which module is being used by which card.

Now in Arch:

nano -w /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf

blacklist snd_hda_intel  <-- or the module listed above

To make sure it does not load, never ever again, you need to create this file:

nano -w /etc/modpobe.d/blacklist.conf

install MODULE /bin/false

Reboot and your sound problems will be a thing of the past.


If however you use on-board sound and this also is the Intel module, then it gets a bit complicated. If there is someone with this problem, just post here and I'll post the threads that deal with this.

 

[Tinuva]

As far as I know you should just update the routing for sound in asound.conf to have the creative card as the primary sound destination, but then again its a while back I played with this to try and get DDL working.

 

[MyWorld]

I really could not find anything anywhere on this.

If there is a better way, then I'll gladly do it the correct way. I'll look into the alsa.conf file, but if memory serves me well KDE did not like this and still made the Nvidia module primary. When I have time I'll look into it again and post the results.

 

[Tinuva]

Really?
On Ubuntu you can change the loading order of the modules via /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf doing options snd-card-audigy index=0 ( used snd-card-audigy cause I don't know the real module name)

According to their wiki you just need to force the modules to load in the correct order, so I guess thats the real way to do it, or blacklist it like you did. http://alsa.opensrc.org/MultipleCards

Anyways I am pretty certain you can still do it in the asound.conf, but then again thats not widely supported.

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

 

[oldhat]

Added ATI card to Ubuntu 11.04 PC recently, 2 devices show up but onboard audio used by default - no problems so far...

 

[MyWorld]

Added ATI card to Ubuntu 11.04 PC recently, 2 devices show up but onboard audio used by default - no problems so far...

It does seem that only KDE is the culprit here. Most posts out there are KDE guys struggling with this.
:-/