Sound issues

[Lee Revell]

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 11:07 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> > Looking at the bugs in Malone I see tons of "no sound" type issues, but
> > I have never seen anyone from Ubuntu submit an ALSA bug report.
> > 
> > I don't see how these can ever be fixed if they aren't pushed upstream.
> > Is there really no one from Ubuntu coordinating with ALSA developers?
> 
> While I am far from an expert on sound, I _have_ had plenty of experience
> with sound not working (and it occurs to me it's off again...).  ime, all
> of these problems have been solved by playing with configurations - which
> would seem to indicate that largely it isn't an upstream issue.

Historically, "no sound" is usually a mixer settings issue.

But lately there has been a proliferation of Intel HDA hardware.  This
chipset has a maddening design that requires the driver to retrieve
information about the hardware capabilities and topology from the BIOS.
Of course, many BIOSes are broken, so this often does not work - it's
cheaper for the vendors to just hard code the information into their
Windows driver.

The upshot is that there's a flood of new hardware on the market that
requires extensive trial and error with the users to get working.  The
ALSA developers cannot possibly get access to all this gear themselves.
So it's more important than ever for any bug reports that distros get
for ALSA to be pushed upstream.

I've looked at Malone and I see many bugs that are already known in the
ALSA bug tracker, and many that I have never seen.  If these were pushed
upstream we'd have more testers and more data and could fix them faster.

Lee