Thursday, January 03, 2013

Sound on Aspire One 725 and Ubuntu 12.10

I tried running VLC to listen an internet radio station for the first time on my new Acer Aspire One 725 today.  I plugged my headphones into the jack but I did not have any sound.  My first debug tool is to run alsamixer from the command line.  I was surprised to see the following output in alsamixer:


This did not look like it was going to work.  Pressing F6 showed the following devices:


After doing some Googling, I found the aplay and lspci commands that would show the information below:

kurtis@acer725:~$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC271X Analog [ALC271X Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
kurtis@acer725:~$  lspci -vnn | grep -iA5 audio
00:01.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Wrestler HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6250/6310] [1002:1314]
Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0740]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46
Memory at 90244000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities:
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
--
00:14.2 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson Azalia Controller [1022:780d] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0740]
Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 47
Memory at 90240000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities:
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel

From this information I selected the second device from the F6 list in alsamixer.  The reason I chose this device was because aplay had it listed as card 1 and it was an analog device.  Here is what the initial settings in alsamixer showed for this device:


Notice that the Master and the Headphone properties have MM listed at the bottom of the volume indicators.  The MM means the property has been muted.  The tab key allows for movement between properties and pressing the M key unmutes a property and replaces with a number representing a volume level.

The following screenshot is the properties that now work on my laptop.



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