Onboard USB Audio Problems on Feisty.

[The Gavitron]

Hi all,

I wanted to share a recent experience with the list, in hopes of
helping others, and potentially getting this fixed for the next
release. (if it isn't already...)

I recently built an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn machine, using an ASUS M2N-E
SLI motherboard.  This board has on board sound, in the form of a
C-Media USB card.

Installation went smoothly, but when I got around to testing the
sound, I was getting errors from almost everything telling me that no
soundcard was detected.  I found this odd, since I had been playing
with lsusb already, and I _knew_ I had seen the sound card there.

I first found this reference;
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSoundProblems

Following the destructions told me a number of things -
 - The sound card was detected, and modules loaded.
 - the soundcard was listed in aplay -l
 - the Solitary soundcard was listed as Card1 not card0.

Some refined google searching referred me to a post on this list:

Upgrade to Edgy [...] sound and video format hell. PARTIALLY SOLVED
by Michael T. Richter Feb 07, 2007; 07:25pm
http://www.nabble.com/Upgrade-to-Edgy-causes-much-laptop-grief:-sound-and-video-format-hell.-t3186524.html

Wherein I learned about these two lines from /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

#options snd-usb-audio index=-2
#options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2

by commenting them out and rebooting, my soundcard woes were over.

The post-mortem is that these two lines prevented my only soundcard
from becoming card0, which then broke all the audio applications,
since many/most/all of them seem to hard-code the address of /card0
instead of choosing the lowest numbered card.

The fix seems to be one of two things - Either change the contents of
alsa-base, or change all of the audio applications to use the
lowest-numbered audio device instead of hard coding card0.  To my
simple mind, the former seems far more realistic a solution.

If Asus has started moving to USB onboard sound, there is no doubt in
my mind that other board manufactures will soon follow, eventually
making this problem an FAQ, rather than an oddity.  Better to fix it
now than then.

Please CC, as I am not subscribed.

Regards,
Gavin McDonald.