Fix Sound Configuration for SB X-FI Fatality

[stephenadrian]

Hi,
I want to be able to use my SB X-FI Fatality card but Mageia keeps on defaulting to HDA Nvidia (from my Geforce 570 Graphics card). I have been able to disabled in BIOS the Motherboard on-board sound.

How do I expunge the HDA Nvidia Kernel Modual and or black list it. I found a website that discussed how to do it following, however I was unable to progress past the first command to black list it and I got no further than 'make menuconfig' to removing it from the Kernel.

http://techgage.com/news/disabling_nvid ... der_linux/

Also if you can suggest how to enable Digital S/PDIF 5.1 stereo output on the SB X-FI Fatality card.

Thanks
Stephen

[doktor5000]

You should be able to use pavucontrol to select the default sound chip by the use of the "fallback"
switches (green shield with a check mark on it) and if i remember correctly, you need to check your primary
device as fallback. The actual description of this thing is quite misleading, as it does the direct opposite of what
it should do, if you think about the description.

[stephenadrian]

Thanks for the suggestion, I haven't heard from anyone else, however it made no difference. I still have HDA Nvidia come up as default from time to time and I often have to restart my computer until it accidentally picks the right configuration by chance.

I still would like to know how to uninstall everything and anything to do with HDA Nvidia and get true 5.1 digital sound.

[colin]

OK, so there are a few issues in this post. I'll deal with them individually.

1. You say you have been able to disabled in BIOS the on-board card. If this is the case I'm confused that you need to do anything about it. Perhaps what you are seeing is the HDA driver for your Graphics cards HDMI output?
2. Your sound preferences depend very much on which desktop you are running. Are you using KDE or GNOME or something else? (pavucontrol is very much a low level access tool - I wouldn't really recommend using it for general purpose stuff unless you have specific needs).
3. You ask about enabling "Digital S/PDIF 5.1 stereo output".... this is contradictory. You cannot have 6ch and stereo (2ch) at the same time... Which do you want? I presume you want digital 5.1 output? Sadly, this is something that is not possible via S/PDIF directly (there is simply not enough bandwidth). You have to decide between one of too options: 1) use passthrough only - that is only play back videos/movies that have audio pre-encoded in a format your receiver can understand (e.g. AC3 or DTS perhaps? - it depends on the receiver). or 2) Use a software encoder that encodes audio to an encoded format your receiver understands). At present (I'll be changing soon!) I use option 2 personally. I wrote a blog post about it: http://colin.guthr.ie/2010/12/bobby-dig ... -surround/ It describes how to enable the software encoder and select it as an output.

Hopefully this info helps and will prompt more information from you so I can help better.

[stephenadrian]

Thanks Colin for the help. Sorry for the delay in responding, however 5.1 Digital Stereo is now working on my PC.

I was having other issues, General protection fault: 0000[#1,2,3,4,5,6 etc.] SMP, at the same time. I was having issues late last year with my PC, so I had already swapped out the motherboard, to no effect with intermittent faults reoccurring. After using multiple test on my hard drives, graphics card and memory, and with them all passing the tests, I read an old dated post mentioning memory as a possible cause. With memory so cheep now I put in 16G and waited a couple of weeks. I have so far had no reoccurrence of the protection fault.

Just to answer your questions, I have a:
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Motherboard, with on board sound disabled in BIOS,
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor, can you believe this, I just realised I bought this in July 2009 and there is little if any improvement in the new AMD CPUs.
Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium series [EMU20k2], now with compatible drivers for Windows 7 and Linux, I still have the SB Live that wouldn't work with Windows 7.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (GPU 0), HDA sound through HDMI cable, no way to disable the sound through a BIOS or Software, however I have been able to configure as described in your blog with the rebuild of the OS.

I am running Mageia 1, with KDE, after the last crash I had to re install the OS as the file system was corrupted to the point where the usual repair tools failed.

Using you Blog to setup 5.1 worked , however is there a way for the output to be simultaneously digital (for my 5.1 Yamaha Stereo) and analogue (for my wireless sennheizer headphones)?