2 sounds cards, how to select which is active?

[adamk]

I have a laptop with a built in sound card and a USB Griffin iMic sound card. (The headphone jack broke on the built in unit, hence the external one). Both card are recognized and show up in KMix. The trouble is, the system defaults to the internal card and I have no idea how to tell it to output to the USB card. Any ideas?

[lowey23]

Re: 2 sounds cards, how to select which is active?

Not sure about your laptop, but on my PC I had to disable the onboard sound in BIOS.

HTH

[adamk]

Re: 2 sounds cards, how to select which is active?

The laptop unfortunately does not have that option in the bios. I had this setup working fine in Feisty, I just can't for the life of me figure out exactly how.

[adamk]

Re: 2 sounds cards, how to select which is active?

Well, here is where I am at. I found out how to override the KDE default sound card by doing the following:

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [A5451     ]: ALI5451 - ALI 5451
           ALI 5451 at 0x8400, irq 5
 1 [system     ]: USB-Audio - iMic USB audio system
           Griffin Technology, Inc iMic USB audio system at usb-0000:00:02.0-2, full speed

Then, in the KDE "System Settings" go to the "Sound System" and in the "override device location" box enter:

hw:system

then apply and test. Note that what is entered is the name of the sound card that you wish to use in [ ]'s of cat /proc/asound/cards.

This, however, only seems to get the KDE sounds to come out of the usb sound card. To get Amarok to output to it, I had to configure its xine engine to use alsa instead of "auto", then in the mono and stereo boxes put in "hw:system" (the name of the sound card). Firefox still uses the internal card and I bet most other programs will.

Is there a better solution? I don't want to have to configure every program.

[SheeEttin]

Re: 2 sounds cards, how to select which is active?

You probably have to configure ALSA somewhere. Try looking for ALSA man pages.

[monkwarrior]

Re: 2 sounds cards, how to select which is active?

I'm having the same problem, tho it's on a pc with an internal and an SB5.1 sound card.
* disabling the internal soundcard in bios didn't work
* disabling references in the alsa-base file seemed to work for 2 days but after all it didn't work

Kubuntu seems to switch to my SB5.1 card sometimes , very random ....
So I'm out of options right now.
How to choose the SB5.1 card as my primary soundcard ?

If an alsa specialist could point out which files to edit: let us know

Monk.