USB Audio problem, HELP!!!

[netstrider]

Recently I've been playing around with several different linux distro's. I like running the live CD before actually installing it. I have a problem with playing audio though.

I have Gigabyte USB speakers (nothing special, got it for free in a bundle) and I a Logitech headset which also connects via USB. I ran both Mepis and PCLinuxOS live cd's and everything worked perfectly on them, even more on PCLinuxOS if I may say so, but I could not configure my audio...so I have no sound.

What you're looking at here is a typical Linux newbie with no experience whatsoever, whom has been using Windows for a decade (I'm 17 btw) and who's at the turning point.

I use the normal on-board sound card on my MSI Neo Platinum 925X and it detects my audio driver by itself....but I don't know if it's correct. (Will post the name of the driver sometime, can't remember it now). Anyhow, when I use the Headset I can hear myself speaking through the speakers but I can't listen to any of my 9889 songs and neither do my videos have sound...they do play though

Any help on this topic will be greatly appreciated!!!

[anarchon]

run dmesg and see if there is no problem with there. (just type dmesg at prompt)
check that your volume is on.
do lsmod and see if all modules for you souncard are loaded.

[fingal]

Hi - That's a lot of songs! It might just be that some of your sound channels are turned all the way down. You need to be aware of which sound system you're using: a popular one - which is probably the best to use - is called ALSA. You'll need to dig around in your menu system and find KDE>Sound or whatever is relevant on your computer

Assuming you are using ALSA, open a terminal up and type amixer. This is a command line version of the mixer programme. Scroll left and right using your arrow keys and turn up your channels.

See if that helps. If it does work and you've turned up any of your channels too far you might get some feedback through your speakers. If so, try reducing your channels a bit.

[netstrider]

It is set on ALSA, that's what my Control Center says, but when I do lsmod it says the following ...*roughly* (I'm not quite sure whether it's lsmod which I ran that gave me this but in the Control Center it gave me a few options to run and when I ran a certain one it gave me this...

sound: 0: off 1: off 2: on 3: on 4: on 5: on 6: off

I'm not quite sure what this means and I don't know how to turn 0,1 and 6 on...Remember, this is my first time using Linux actually. I used to just play around with the GUI, now I'm officially trying to switch from windows to some distro that is cool. I have SuSE 10.1 and Mandrake 10...oh and CentOS (Very similar to red had apparently)

Thanks for the replies, I'll try at home

[netstrider]

Well I have the following information, I don't know if it will help but I do hope so!!!

Sound Driver: snd-hda-intel [ALSA]

When I switch to any other driver AmaroK and XMMS does not play the music (If I look at the bouncing
lines etc. lol) But when it's on the default intel [ALSA] driver it does. So this must be a problem with
the USB speakers. According to my brother the USB speakers don't use the sound card in order to play, but
instead has it's own "built in" little sound card of some sort...so I'd like to know if anyone can help me with this
or should I go and buy myself some cheap regular non-usb speakers and save the effort?

Thanks in advance