[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio and alsa snd-hda-intel driver

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 21.07.08 10:04, Jack Howarth (howarth at bromo.msbb.uc.edu) wrote:

>    I am trying to get esound compatibility playback from pulseaudio
> to work in Fedora 9 (using the most current pulseaudio srpm from
> rawhide from 0.9.11-0.6.git20080626). With the pulseaudio server
> deinstalled, I get normal playback via direct alsa with aplay
> and via oss with audacity. However with the pulseaudio server
> installed, I am having no luck with esound compatibility. Any
> playback via pulseaudio is highly distorted. I should note that
> I am using the latest kernel 2.6.26-git6 which has all of the
> alsa-driver 1.0.17 changes merged into it now. I have also replaced
> all of the alsa 1.0.16 packages with 1.0.17 versions and rebuilt
> pulseaudio against that. This is being used on a MacBook Pro version 2.
>     I am loading the snd-hda-intel kernel driver with..
> 
> alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel

Don't do that. That's not how module loading works these days. udev
loads drivers for all hardware it finds automatically. You should not
need any manual configuration. In fact having alsa specific config
frags in /etc/modprobe.conf.d/ can actually break your sound setup
since it might bind fixed indexes to specific drivers which might then
end up conflicting with automaticly assigned indexes due to hotplug.

> and the driver loads fine without additional kernel options.
>    I noticed the tickets...
> 
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/25
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/139
> 
> Could my problems be related to ticket 25 since I assume that
> I am using the snd-hda-intel driver directly on the hardware?

No. This is completely unrelated.

> Do I need to resort to something like the fix mentioned in...
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/109439

No. This is a particularly bad idea. Very bad. 

> load-module module-alsa-sink device=default
> load-module module-alsa-source device=default

Don't do that. You create "loops" in the stack with that. 

> Thanks in advance as there doesn't seem to be any clear information
> out there on using snd-hda-intel with pulseaudio.

Because there doesn't need to be any. udev should configure
snd-hda-intel. And PA should find the card then automatically via HAL.

The thing is that the hda driver has some issues. Make sure to install
the very latest alsa-lib on rawhide (1.0.17-2) which has my patches
which fixes most of them. (available in rawhide since yesterday)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
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