Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Years ago, I bought an “Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card. The sound is great and support under Linux is OK. The Xonar card is connected via fiber cable to a “Canton DM55” sound bar below my screen. My PC also has a GeForce GTX 560 Ti Nvidia graphic card installed. Therefore there are two potential sources for the sound: Nvidia via HDMI and the Xonar sound card. For my music-collection, I use QuodLibet, Mpv to watch videos, and Audacious for listening to radio stations.
Every time I boot Linux, Nvidia and Xonar are discovered in a different order, as seen in Alsamixer: - default 0 Nvidia 1 Xonar STX 2 HD Pro Webcam C920 or: - default 0 Xonar STX 1 Nvidia 2 HD Pro Webcam C920 QuodLibet and/or Mpv started sometimes without sound. But Audacious never had a problem finding the right Xonar S/PDF port.
After several attempts, and some extensive searching on the Internet, I found a hint: It says in an aside that some programs accept symbolic names. I queried the symbolic names with: aplay -L iec958:CARD=STX,DEV=0 Xonar STX, Multichannel IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output ⇐== for Canton-DM55 ⇐== and defined the symbolic name to use alsa in: QuodLibet>File>Preferences>Playback>Output Pipeline: alsasink device=iec958 and in Mpv: ~/.conf/mpv/mpv.conf: audio-device=alsa/iec958
QuodLibet and Mpv seem to belong to these “some” programs, the sound is working fine, Audacious has still no problems, but Firefox remained silent. I tried to fix that with: cat ~/.asoundrc defaults.pcm.!card STX default.pcm.!device 1 defaults.ctl.!card STX Finally there is sound in Firefox, but not for long … after some restarts it didn’t work any longer. I tried other browsers (Vivaldi, Chromium) – all remained silent.
I disabled in BIOS the sound-chip on the mainboard a long time ago. Now I looked for a way to disable the Nvidia audio. However, I didn’t find any button or option in the “Nvidia X server settings” in the newest linux-driver (390.87). Searching the internet again, I found another hint: the kernel module snd_hda_intel is causing trouble! sudo lspci -vv … 01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GF114 HDMI Audio Controller (rev a1) Subsystem: CardExpert Technology GF114 HDMI Audio Controller … Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel … 03:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8788 [Oxygen HD Audio] Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Virtuoso 100 (Xonar Essence STX) … Kernel driver in use: snd_virtuoso Kernel modules: snd_virtuoso
To prevent Linux from loading snd_hda_intel during startup I defined a blacklist: /etc/modeprobe.d/blacklist.conf: blacklist snd_hda_intel After a restart Alsamixer shows - default 0 Xonar STX 1 HD Pro Webcam C920 the Nvidia is no longer in the list! After enabling card and port with Alsamixer I did an alsactl store After another restart Firefox remained silent; Audacious and QuodLibet with sound, as before.
At least the Xonar remained always in position 0. Somebody had written the sound MUST be configured in pavucontrol for Firefox: pavucontrol >Configuration>Profile>Digital Stereo Duplex(IEC958) >Configuration>Output Device>Port>Digital Output (S/PDIF) >Configuration>Input Device>Port>Digital Input (S/PDIF) After another restart, the sound worked fine in Audacious, Mpv, QuodLibet AND Firefox (finally!).
P.S. I’ve used Linux since 1996, first S.U.S.E, then, around 2004 I switched to Ubuntu, and 2013 to Mint. At the moment, I play around with MX-Linux with XFCE. And yes, sound was always kind of a problem.
References: https://superuser.com/questions/53957/what-do-alsa-devices-like-hw0-0-mean-how-do-i-figure-out-which-to-use https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ALSA#Hardware_detection https://techgage.com/news/disabling_nvidias_hdmi_audio_under_linux/