M-Audio Audiophile 2496 on Ubuntu 9.10 = No sound!?

You have Ubuntu 9.10. You own M-Audio Audiophile 2496 audio interface. And you can’t hear a thing?

I had to deal with this twice.
First time it was when I upgraded my Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. Everything was fine, except: my 2496 Audiophile stopped playing any sound at all. Daemon.log didn’t show any errors coming from pulse, I could clearly kill and start it without any errors whatsoever. So,  I let my xmms play a song, went to  the Pulse configuration, to see if xmms gets registered as a valid audio stream. Guess what, the bars (vu-meters) were pulsing left to right decently meaning that sound was actually been streamed.
But still I couldn’t hear a thing.
I then tried changing the chosen output device profile in Preferences -> Sound -> Hardware -> Profile, but none of them helped. Googling around showed that dozens of people have experienced the same problem, and that there was not only ONE problem, but sometimes 2-3 different problems which pretty much looked alike.

Here are shortly the 2 problems I saw people complained about:

  1. Ubuntu didn’t recognize hardware / didn’t load any drivers whatsoever
  2. Ubuntu recognized the driver but still no sound coming out

My problem belonged to the second group.

Solutions for this problem were mostly these:

Solution #1

create /etc/udev/rules.d/yourown_ice1712.rules file and copy into it:

SUBSYSTEM!="sound", GOTO="ice1712_end"
ACTION!="change", GOTO="ice1712_end"
KERNEL!="card*", GOTO="ice1712_end"
SUBSYSTEMS=="pci", ATTRS{vendor}=="0x1412", ATTRS{device}=="0x1712", ATTRS{subsystem_vendor}=="0x1412", ATTRS{subsystem_device}=="0xd634", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="via-ice1712.conf"
LABEL="ice1712_end"

Then edit another file: /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/via-ice1712.conf
and copy/paste the contents from: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/34620379/via-ice1712.conf

After this you should restart Pulse:

$ pulseaudio --kill
$ pulseaudio --start

This helped some people but it did not help me. So I’ve searched on.
Maybe it will fix your yours though, don’t know give it a try. Here is the link:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/178442 to the complete discussion thread which is PRICELESS if you have sound problems with Koala.

Solution #2

The solution to my problem was much simpler than the aforementioned! I simply had to instruct Pulse to expect a front device which has 10 channels, by default it expects only 2 channels. Thanks to Asmo (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/178442/comments/65) this was fairly easy to fix. Read the link, or just edit /usr/share/alsa/cards/ICE1712.conf and add to the ICE1712.pcm.front.0{} section these two lines:

slave.format S32_LE
slave.channels 10

A very helpful link I found out there – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=843012

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Comment