Multiple soundcards, one sometimes disappearing

[mthmulders]

Hello all,

Let me first describe my situation: I am having a computer with a sound-chip on the motherboard; there is a sound card on the PCI-bus; and finally, there's a TV-tuner. I prefer to connect my headset to the on-board chip while connecting my 5.1 speaker system to the PCI-sound card. Skype can be configured to use a specific sound card, so that works fine.

Now, when I boot my Kubuntu system, my sound cards appear in random order. That is, sometimes the PCI-card is listed first (in /proc/asound/cards), sometimes it is the motherboard-chip. Because I don't like to reconfigure both Skype and KDE every time, I figured out that it is possible to specify a fixed index in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. This is the relevant part:

# Load snd-seq for devices that don't have hardware midi;
#  Ubuntu #26283, #43682, #56005; works around Ubuntu #34831 for
#  non-Creative Labs PCI hardware
install snd /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe -Qb snd-seq ; }
# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
# My own options, combined with the solution for Ubuntu bug #62691
options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388 index=0
options snd-bt87x index=-2
options cx88-alsa index=-2
options saa7134-alsa index=-2
options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2
options snd-intel8x0m index=-2
options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2
# Ubuntu #62691, enable MPU for snd-cmipci
# options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388

This does partially solve my problem. My PCI-sound card (that's the cmipci) is listed first... if listed at all. Many times, after booting, I find myself with one sound card less. All cards are listed, except for the cmipci card. The strange thing is that lspci does list the card.

Can anybody shed light on this?