sound breaks when running any sound application

Hi,

I have got two sound cards, on on board NVidia sound card (running with the snd_hda_intel, codec AD1988B) and another Creative XTreme audio, which runs with the CA0106 alsa driver.

Until recently, both cards worked well. But after an update of the alsa drivers, a problem has been introduced : sound breaks for the snd_hda_intel sound card after running any application.

This can be perfectly reproduced. When I start my computer, I can test both sound cards using the GStreamer properties application : testing the device output for both cards gives a perfectly normal sound.

When I start an audio application such as banshee, or alsaplayer, vlc, …, sound breaks :

  • the audio application starts to run at 100% CPU
  • audio disappears
  • in GStreamer, the device AD198x Analog item diseappears

I have to kill the banshee, alsaplayer or vlc application, because even after closing the application it remains at 100% CPU. After killing, the device AD1988x Analog reappears in GStreamer properties.

In /var/log/messages, I see a line
pulseaudio[4172]: pcm_hw.c: SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_DRAIN failed

Does anybody have a clue where to look further ? I’m stuck. I’m thinking it has something to do with the alsa kernel module, but I don’t know where to look.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Bart

If your only update was an alsa update, and this problem happened, then I would raise a bug report:
Submitting Bug Reports - openSUSE