ALC889A Digital output in openSUSE 11.1

English Hardware
1

I am having a problem finding how enable the digital output stream on my onboard audio chip. After running the script at /usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh as many others on this forum were instructed to do, I learned that alsa has correctly identified my chip as a Realtek ALC889A codec. The output of the script is here: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=b75f4f5b20ac59e119c5b5fec0d3a6950fe19a72
However, even though aplay -l reports that the digital output is present, I can’t seem to find any place in the GNOME menus or in YAST where I can enable that stream. The pulseaudio mixer reports only one output device, labeled HDA Intel - ALC885 Analog. Can someone point me in the right direction here? Note that I had passed the argument ‘6stack-digout’ to the kernel module - I don’t know if it was correctly identifying the chip before or not, but either way I still couldn’t figure out how to get it working from GNOME.

Edit - I realized I left out some important info here:

The analog part of the chip does in fact function, and I can listen to my headphones, but it would be nice to have my speakers working again - it’s just that they need a coax digital input. I didn’t know where to post this, so if it needs to be moved to a more appropriate forum I apologize for the inconvenience.

Thanks,
Hunter

2

Well, I figured it out finally, and thought I would post my solution here in case anybody else is looking for this. If I ran alsamixer under a normal user, the IEC958 switches were not present. However, running sudo alsamixer brought up many different options and included the IEC958 switch which turned on the digital output.

Hunter

3

You should not have to do that with root permissions.

Try adding your regular user to group “audio”, restart your PC, and see if the regular user than has those options.

4

Oldcpu,

Unfortunately adding my user account to the ‘audio’ group did not solve the problem. When I run alsamixer as my user, which is a member of the groups audio, video, dialout, and users, the only volume fader I get is for the master output. I am using the default configuration of Gnome, which I believe relies on pulseaudio running. The GUI mixer from within Gnome displays only the analog output under the “Output Devices” tab.

Thank you very much for your help.

Hunter

Edit:

OK, so it seems that running alsamixer -c 0 does indeed give me the full gamut of options that also appear when running alsamixer under the root account. I just find it odd that this is not the default behavior. If I had been paying better attention earlier, I would have noticed that when running alsamixer without the additional argument it gives me the device called “PulseAudio.” I still don’t understand why pulseaudio seems to have no idea that the digital output capability exists.

5

Congratulations on sorting that.

If you wish to pursue this to see if this can be made more automatic for all users, you could write a bug report on this. Guidance for bug reports is here: Submitting Bug Reports - openSUSE

The SuSE-GmbH alsa packager is also an alsa developer, and by writing a bug report (being certain to raise the report against the component “sound”) you will have a reasonable chance of getting the attention of an alsa developer.