Solution to No Sound from Second Sound Card

[Peter Torpey]

Whew - I finally figured out why I wasn't getting any sound out of my second
sound card.

 

Somehow the volume must have gotten muted (or put down to 1%).

 

Trying to fix the volume using Orca was certainly a challenge.

 

Unless I missed something and there is an easier way of changing the sound,
I finally found the asoundconf command.  I ran this from the terminal, but a
strange graphical interface popped up that was totally unusable with Orca.
Even the flat review mode was not able to give useful information.

 

Next, I tried the command amixer.  This is a command line utility for
changing the settings of various sound devices.  If it's helpful to anyone
else, some of the commands which seemed to help were:

 

# a command to list the controls of sound device 1

amixer -c 1 controls   

# a command to show the settings for each control of device 1

amixer -c 1 contents

# finally, a command to change the volume to 100% on device 1

Amixer -c 1 set PCM 100%

 

I would have thought that something as ubiquitous as changing volume should
be easier to do.

 

Also, in the process of working this out, I removed pulseaudio.  Should Orca
be running with pulseaudio or not for best results?

 

The pulseaudio volume settings are also difficult (if not impossible) to use
with Orca.

 

Well, at least I can hear Orca out of the correct sound device now.

 

Maybe this will be useful to someone else.

 

--Pete

 

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