Second Sound card 11.2

English Hardware
1

Hi,

I am trying to add a second sound card to one of my boxes but am having absolutely no success.

The one card that is working is an on-board M5455 (called AC97 by the bios etc) and runs just great using the Intel8x0 driver. However, when I try to add another card, things go really strange.

The new card is a pci, ensoniq using the ens1371 driver.

When I boot the box up with this card in place, the original AC97 disappears! It is not anymore seen by “lspci” but the new card is. If I remove the new card, the AC97 reappears in “lspci”.

With both cards in, prior to any kind of configuration on my part, login sounds etc are played through the new pci card. At this stage, Yast says that it is not configured.

With both cards in, I try Yast to see if I can get something configured. The AC97 is listed along with the new card. If I try to set the volume controls etc for the AC97, all I get is a “test” button and no sound is heard.

If I “delete” the card and try to re-configure it, I get a failure installing the driver.

The same thing happens if I try to configure the new pci card. It fails trying to install the driver.

/etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf has a couple of lines mentioning the AC97. I’ve tried some things that I saw from other posts on this forum like disabling the AC97 in bios and moving the 50-sound.conf out of the directory but nothing changes the behaviour. I’ve even tried adding lines describing the new pci card in there but still nothing.

It’s weird but with both cards in and without any success configuring the pci card via Yast, I can get apps like Skype to play through the pci card.

Anybody know what the problem is? After all, the new card is just another pci device.

Cheers - AK

2

Having 2 soundcards in Linux is tricky. If you don’t want to use the on-board one, you should disable it in the BIOS setup. That will make things much easier.

3

PTA. It’s not that I don’t want to use the onboard, I do but I would like to use another sound card so that I can use one card for some things and the other, for other things. Often, at the same time.

If I look at things like configuring KDE to use “X” card for music, notifications etc I am led to think that > 1 sound card is available. In Yast, I see things like “card configured as snd-0” or similar so why not?

Cheers - AK

4

As per, been doing some googling etc. Seems there is not a lot of problem controlling alsa to do what I would want.

My issue is, probably, with udev in that when the new card is in, the onboard card disappears. Next step is to look at how that udev voodoo tries to work.

5

Re: Second Sound card 11.2

I have resolved this, at least to a large degree.

Anyhow, this is how I finally managed to get both the onboard sound card work with a second ICE Sound Card.

It turns out that my bios will attempt to replace the onboard card with the new card when it detects the new card on the PCI bus. The kernel finds both during the hardware probe stage but when you try to configure the second card, it fails. I think this is because there is a clash of IRQ/IO address. It’s odd because the driver for my card (ensoniq) was already loaded before I try to configure the card.

Anyway, here’s what to do.

First, check that your bios has menu options that allow you to both “disable” and “hide from OS” for PCI devices. With my bios, the “hide” option is under “Security/Device Security”. If you don’t have both, the rest of this post is irrelevant.

So, first “disable” the onboard sound card. In my case, this was referred to as “Intel Onboard Sound”. Then, go to the “Security/Device Security” tab and “Hide from OS” the onboard card.

If you don’t hide the onboard card, the kernel will find it and the rest of the post will not apply.

If you now reboot, you should find that you have no sound at all.

OK. Shutdown and insert your other sound card. Switch on and go again into bios and disable this card - you should see it under “Devices/PCI Devices” in the same spot where the onboard card was.

Now boot up. Any sound will be from the card because, despite the “disable” at bios level, the kernel finds it and loads the driver.

Now you should find that you can go into Yast2 and configure the soundcard. Do this and then reboot into the bios.

In the bios, make the onboard card visible to the OS /“Security/Device Security/Hide From OS”. Change that so that the OS will find it on the probe. Leave the second card “Disabled”.

Reboot and you should now have both cards working.

You can distribute system sounds etc to one card or the other. However, I found that stuff like video in the browser always went to card 0 despite what I told the KDE “Manage Devices”.

My main reason for wanting to do this was so that I could have Skype ring my speakers but conduct the call using headphones and mic without shutting off the speakers. That way, I can still listen to the radio whilst I’m on the Skype call.

I went into the sound options of skype and, at least during this setup environment, was able to direct any one or more of the sound options to either card.

I ended up with ringing to one card and “speakers” to the other. The Skype test call (echo service) went perfectly. I asked someone to give me a call to test the setup in real life. The ringing came from the right place and I was able to pick up the call via the other. Skype then crashed (segfault). Since I have an 11.2 vintage Skype and I am now on 11.3, I have installed the most-recent version available from the Skype site (could not find it searching SuSE downloads).

As far as setup goes, it works just as before. Am awaiting new test calls to see what happens.

So the sound cards thing is OK, any problems with Skype are clearly Skype issues.