Hello,

since about a month or two I have been experiencing a problem with my Toshiba Satellite M50-228 which I had bought about three or four years ago. Its sound hardware is what giving me a headache. The chipset is ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 80).

There are, actually two problems. Both of them I have experienced as I still used Ubuntu Linux, I experience them now using Gentoo Linux, and they also are there when booting from a Linux LiveCD (Ubuntu, Knoppix, Gentoo, etc.).

The first problem is the most annoying one. When there's some process in the background (like compilation of a new package), while I'm listening to music, suddenly the sound will kinda "freeze". It will play a very short (about half a second) piece of sound over and over again. In this case the only thing that helps is a reboot. Even a forced reload of ALSA modules doesn't do the trick.

This problem encounters irregulary: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can let my laptop play music all night long and in the morning it will still work. Sometimes the sound "freezes" in a couple of minutes. By the way, sometimes it also does "freeze", when there's no process in the background.

The second problem has to do with the recording. Whenever I try to record my voice (using some sound recording software or talking on Skype) it becomes strongly low-pitched. I have to speak like Chip'n'Dale to make it sound like Louis Armstrong. This really drives me nuts, since I used to use Skype very often.

I couldn't check whether these problems also arise under Windows: I don't want to spend a whole load of time installing it just to test the sound and then erase it again. But since they occur also when booting from LiveCD's (which never hapenned before), I suppose, they are hardware problems and not software or driver problems.

What can I do about it? Is it possible to replace the sound chipset in the laptop?

Thank you in advance for all your answers and suggestions!

Forgot to add: While the sound is "frozen", the "PC Speaker" still works. System beeps and all other sounds produced by the PC Speaker are played normally without freezing.

Anyone?

Hmm, since I got kicked over here to take a look at this....

Not really a good idea on what is going on. I mean I can tell you what is likely happening at a low level, but exactly why it is happening is something else.

When the sound freezes, there is likely a buffer being read over and over again by the sound card DA. Typically I would associate this with a driver problem, but if you are forcing the unload of all of ALSA and reloading it, and it still continues, something else seems to be going on there that I don't have an easy answer for.

The second problem you described is a sample rate conversion problem most likely. Are you using any ALSA plugins(You would likely know if you were, they have to be set up manually and some conf files written by hand)?

Seablade

Leaving this here for right now as we are unsure if it is hardware or software related, but I might move it to the Linux forum before long, for one thing it is much easier for me to answer things there

cheers ...

2 Seablade, first of all, thank you for your answer.

No plugins, and anyway the same story also happens when booting from LiveCDs, so I don't think, it has something to do with ALSA.

I'm pretty sure that both problems are hardware problems, so my question mainly concerns the possibility of replacing the sound hardware without having to by a new motherboard (or a new laptop).

Well you have a couple of options then. USB1 Class compliant devices should work, but stay away from USB2 devices. You could also look at a couple of PCMCIA cards as well. Pretty much check alsaproject.org and/or ffado.org to see what is supported.

qhn would you mind kicking the thread over to me in the Linux forum since this is leaving the realm of hardware and looking more towards software issues.

Seablade

It is done.

cheers ...

In that case I would not be able to use the built-in speakers in the notebook, since they would be still connected to the on-board-sound, right? But anyway, I am going to use headphones mostly, so it doesn't matter. So thank you very much for that advice.

Yea it won't help onboard sound at all no.

To be honest I am not completely convinced that the issue is hardware yet, but it definitely is a possibility I will admit. Unfortunately without being at the machine, I wouldn't begin to be able to test much deeper than it sounds like you have on whether it is a hardware issue or not.

Seablade

Thank you very much for your answers! I will now look for PCMCIA or USB devices.

Before you give up on using your laptop's built in sound hardware with Linux, you should note that this chipset does turn up as problematic in plenty of posts on Linux user forums across the internet. For example you can read this Ubuntu bug report and see very similar problems to what you describe with your system.

This Ubuntu users forum thread provides a solution that's also repeated in this Linux Mint users forum thread, and it basically involves blacklisting the sound chip modem driver from loading, because it apparently can conflict with the alsa driver. You should at the minimum give that a try and see if that helps with some of your sound problems.

Under Ubuntu, you're basically looking at editing the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file, or under Gentoo (what I use), it's the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file. Remember you need to edit the file as the root user, or with the sudo command, so you can save the file with the changes. This is what the default one looks like;
You then should add the blacklist command for your sound chipset's modem driver;
So you end up with a blacklist file that looks something like;
If this doesn't solve your problem, or your system was not autloading the modem module to begin with, you can try and follow the instructions for tweaking the Sound control under Linux extracted from the above Ubuntu users forum thread in this post. Maybe by tweaking things following those instructions, some of your issues may be addressed.

Good Luck..