rvdavid: A Web Developer's Blog

So… long story short, I messed up my headphone jack on my notebook which where I use Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha x (6 I think) as my primary OS. Luckily though, I found an old sony external sound card lying around the office at work. One of the artifcats that had been left behind by one of the developers of yester-year.

I thought great! I’ll plug my headphone into the exteral sound card and I can again block the world out with sound the next time things get rowdy in the development room.

Everything worked great! Sound was channelled nicely out through the external sound card out of the box via pulseaudio. All except flash (flashplugin-nonfree) which has been hardwired to use my internal sound card. I don’t know what the particulars are, and what causes this, but I found that completely disabling the internal sound card was the solution.

Here’s how I disabled my internal sound card and forced all sound to use the usb sound card:

1. Blacklist snd_intel8x0 by editing the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-oss.conf and adding “blacklist snd_inten8x0″as the last line blacklist snd_inten8x0
2. Next, edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and replace: “install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-0″
   with: “install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd_usb_audio”
   Your edited file should look like:
   
install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd_usb_audio
#install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-0
3. Comment out options snd-intel8x0m index=-2, options snd-usb-audio and options snd-usb-usx2y so that the options portion of the alsa-base.conf looks like:# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
options bt87x index=-2
options cx88_alsa index=-2
options saa7134-alsa index=-2
options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2
#options snd-intel8x0m index=-2
options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
#options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-us122l index=-2
#options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2
options snd-usb-caiaq index=-2
# Ubuntu #62691, enable MPU for snd-cmipci
options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388
# Keep snd-pcsp from being loaded as first soundcard
options snd-pcsp index=-2
# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10

Can’t get it to work? leave a comment, we’ll sort it out together.

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