Problems with Fedora15 and sound INTEL 82801DB0ICH4

[Rick Sewill]

On Thursday, October 20, 2011 11:35:06 PM Miguel Cardenas wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I have just moved to Fedora 15 (used another distro before), but it appears
> that the sound control is managed by the Phonon... I don't know much about
> it except that tried it some time ago when compiled it as a module for KD4,
> and it did not recognize all my sound devices and some multimedia
> formats...

I believe pulse audio is present on your system.  
I assume, if you do, ps wx | grep [p]ulseaudio
you will see something like
rsewill at rsewill:~ <3:6> $ ps wx | grep [p]ulseaudio
 2463 ?        S<sl   8:42 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start

Have you used pulse audio before?

Try running kmix with KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 as in the following script.

rsewill at rsewill:~ <3:1> $ more bin/kmix-alsa 
#!/bin/bash

export KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 && kmix
rsewill at rsewill:~ <3:2> $ ls -l bin/kmix-alsa
-rwx------. 1 rsewill rsewill 54 Oct 20 00:27 bin/kmix-alsa

> 
> If I open the KMix it does not show the devices, just a single (one)
> control for each input and output, no pcm mic etc. but I guess it is due
> the Phonon that does not support my chipset at all...
> 

The above script may get kmix to show the alsa controls.

> My doubt is, if I install another mixer control software, would it work by
> accessing directly to the audio (kernel?) driver without causing conflict
> to the Phonon?
> 

There is a pulse audio mixer control, pavucontrol, for the PulseAudio sound 
server.
rpm -q -i pavucontrol
You may need to install it, yum install pavucontrol

> And another multimedia related question, when trying AMAROK it told that
> there was no MPEG-1 plugin detected, but looking at the repositories can't
> find something like (using yum)... any idea of what may be wrong?
> 

You say it did not recognize all your sound devices and multimedia formats?

You will need to be more specific...what sound devices are recognized?  
What sound devices are not recognized?

Do you mean you have multiple sound devices such as an internal sound card,
a USB sound device, what?

Do you mean you plugged something into the sound jack and the internal sound 
card isn't behaving properly, such as not doing surround sound or something?
If this is a problem, this opens up, for me, a can of worms.  
It's possible you need to do something like create a file in /etc/modprobe.d
that passes various options to snd-hda-intel
Before going down this path, we need to know if this is, indeed, your problem.
I always get lost and confused going down this path and welcome others help.

What multimedia formats are recognized?
What multimedia formats are not recognized?

The comments, regarding pulse audio, are related to sound devices.

When you say it doesn't recognize multimedia formats, do you mean formats
like mp3?  Fedora doesn't, by default, provide the software for mp3 because
mp3 is a proprietary format.  If you are using audacious, you might need
rpm -q -i audacious-plugins-freeworld-mp3
found in the repository rpmfusion-nonfree
If you are using something else that uses gstreamer,
you might need gstreamer-plugins-bad or gstreamer-plugins-ugly or I don't know 
what else.

A disclaimer...I am interested in sound discussions because I always have 
problems with my own sound configuration.  Usually, when I try to answer
these questions, some kind soul corrects me and both I and the OP learn.

> Thanks!
> 
> Miguel