Jon Åslund

When you sit there in your couch

the cozy, blue one

and want to listen to some fine music on your stereo system

the ugly, grey one

that is connected via an S/PDIF bracket to that sucky motherboard

Asus M2NPV-MX

$ lspci -v | grep Audio -A1
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 81cb

in your computer

the ugly, grey one next to the ugly, grey one

running Debian-flavoured Linux,

$ uname -r
2.6.26-1-686

$ cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.16.

$ dpkg -s libasound2 | grep Version
Version: 1.0.16-2

and everything is silent unless you manually specify the alsa spdif device,

$ aplay -Dspdif i_love_alsa.wav

you don’t need to debug for hours or reboot your computer, because it probably means something has crapped all over asound.state again, which luckily can be fixed by removing the driver,

$ sudo modprobe -r snd_hda_intel

removing the state,

$ sudo rm /var/lib/alsa/asound.state

inserting the driver again

$ sudo modprobe snd_hda_intel

and finally unmuting IEC958.

$ amixer set IEC958 unmute