Horrible sound corruption

I think this is the right place for this.

I have a Compaq Notebook (CQ50 series) and recently installed openSUSE 11 - Gnome.

Just when I thought I had everything configured correctly, any audio file/sound (format doesn’t matter) being played causes loud crackles and static.

The sound panel recognizes the Audio Out as : HDA Nvidia (ALSA Mixer).

Driver Corruption?

You may want to try this if you are using ALSA.

snd-hda-intel – ALSA --5.1 audio - openSUSE Forums

Restart the gui (Gnome in your case), and see what that produces. You may need to further edit this and change the rate parameter to 48000 from 44100 depending on what your sound card supports, but 44100 should be fine for most cases. If it does not help then delete the file and reboot to restore the defaults.

Also check to ensure that your “user-name” is a member of group “audio”.

If this works feedback would be appreciated.

This should work for most on-board and off-board sound cards that support >=5.1 stereo.

Further resources ralated to the use and syntax in .asoundrc can be found at http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc and at http://alsa.opensrc.org/.asoundrc.

Nope, It made it worse (and crashed the sound system)

You could search the web for hda-nvidia linux to see what you can come up with. That’s how I came across providing proper support for my hda-intel. You might just find an .asoundrc configuration that someone has already made and has working on their system.

You could try going to YAST > Hardware > Sound > other > volume and move your PCs volume slider bars UP in volume to the right. Then close YaST. Next go to your mixer, and move DOWN your volume slider bars for master and PCM to try and remove the corruption.

Note, do not use vlc player for your sound test. vlc is notorious for introducing bad quality sound when its volume levels are moved up more than 20 to 25%.

If that does not work, then we will need more information on your system.

… So can you provide more very detailed information so a good recommendation can be given? You can do that, with your PC connected to the internet, by opening a gnome-terminal or a kde konsole and typing:
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh
that will run a diagnostic script and post the output to a web site on the Internet. It will give you the URL of the web site. Please post that URL here. Just the URL. It may be that you need to run that script twice with root permissions.

Also, please copy and paste the following commands one line at a time into a gnome-terminal or a konsole and post here the output: rpm -qa | grep alsa
rpm -qa | grep pulse
rpm -q libasound2
uname -a
cat /etc/modprobe.d/soundWe also need that output.

Hope that this helps.

NVidia do not produce sound cards but their motherboard chipsets do provide a PCI bus interface for audio chips mounted on the motherboard. As a result they can appear to be Nvidia sound cards. See Sound Cards: Introduction for details.

NVidia use a PCI bus interface which is very similar to that used by Intel. As a result the NVidia interfaces can be driven with the intel8x0 alsa driver.

From the Alsa Wiki.

According to what I can find at nVidia.

Component------Platform----------------Use this driver

Audio (AC97)—nForce-1 – nForce-4-----intel8x0.c
Audio (HDA)----nForce-430 and later----hda_intel.c

Just in case the wrong Alsa driver is loaded.