this is my very first post here in this forum. My problem is as follows. I have recently tried to connect my Hercules USB sound card (Muse pocket) to my laptop and tried to configure it the easy way through YAST. YAST didn’t recognize it, so I added a new generic usb-audio soundcard. Playing a test sound worked. “great”, I thought, but that was way to soon…
Pressing on “finish” didn’t change anything, that is to say, the sound ONLY came out of my internal speakers. Since these ones are quite crappy, I set the USB card as the primary sound card. I thought this might solve the problem. Unfortunately I was wrong: By setting it to primary, I had no sound at all. It even got worse, since trying to play the same test sounds as before in YAST didn’t even work.
Any ideas?
By the way I’m not an expert in Linux, but I’ve been using Suse since several years now.
What we really need, is some of the users who manage to get their USB sound working, to write a good wiki guide on it.
A year and a half ago, a user wrote such a guide for USB headphones, but unfortunately it has not been maintained, and hence I don’t link to it from my openSUSE troubleshooting guide. USB headphones - openSUSE
It’s really strange, cause when I set the usb sound card to primary, kmix crashes (restart doesn’t work) and I can’t start alsamixer from konsole. I get the error message: “function snd_ctl_open failed for default”.
I realized that it won’t be possible to use the 5.1 functionality of the card, which is sad enough, but at least I would like to bo able to use the line-in…
I can not tell much to make a WIKI. When configuring with YaST > Hardware > Sound and clicking Add, the only moment that a light bulb may start glowing above your head is when you choose Generic in the left part of the window (make) and then the only choice at the right part (type) is USB Audio. Select, Finish and of you go.
I started doing this on 10.1 and it still works on 10.3.
I tried to tell to all players that they should use the second sound card and not the first. On some players I succeeded, on some I failed. But then I found out that in YaST > Hardware > Sound, when you select the card and click the lower right button (More?) you can choose Make this the primary Card. And that is it.
The only thing that fails is doing this changing of Primary Card in the CLI, so I can put it in a script that can be called from the end-user (read: my wife).
I also found out that the mixer is gone when I let YaST change the primary card. But after that I can start Kmixer again without a problem. It seems to be something particular for yourr card, but it is strange that it the error is not given when it is not the primary.