YaST sound test works, but all other sound is awful

[genemcmanus]

Hi everyone, I love Suse 11.2, but I'm having a problem I haven't been able to solve. YaST detects my soundcard and internal soundcard, and when I use the sound test, everything is fine. But every sound otherwise is just way distorted worse than a My Bloody Valentine concert. Which means it sounds like a jet on a runway. The soundcard is listed correctly as a SoundBlaster Live 5.1, with driver snd-emu-10k1, card 0. The internal card I disable and still get the same results. When I run rpm -q alsa I get: alsa-1.0.21-3.2.i586. This noise is across the board, for every type of media player, even the sound configuration under System>Hardware>Sound. I haven't been able to locate any information about this. I've seen several posts about no sound at all, but not screaming hot white noise instead of regular sound. Again, the YaST test sounds lovely, but everything else is awful. I'm not a complete Linux newbie, but I'm nowhere near savvy enough to figure this out on my own. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[carr]

Hi

Im not much of a SUSe expert either but given your situation I might try the following. I am assuming that you have both onboard (i.e.-a device on the motherboard) as well as the Soundblaster which is plugged in to one of the PCI slots on the machine.

Try checking the machine BIOS to see if its possible to disable the onboard sound device

Try checking System/Yast/Hardware/Sound to make sure that the Soundblaster is selected as the device to use....I might also either disable or delete the configuration listed for the onboard device if in fact its listed on the Sound page.

Check whatever players you are using (i.e. Gxine or Amorak &c) configurations to make sure that they are configured to use ALSA rather than Pulse Audio.

Once again Im not an expert but these would be my first few steps in your situation. Hope this helps

Warmest Regards
Carr