HOWTO Improve Sound Card Support in Fedora

I’ve had this happen on a couple of machines. I install Fedora, turn on the tunes and … it’s barely audible! What’s going on? Well, what is going on is that my sound card is not in Fedora’s database, so the controlling software guessed (badly) how to initialize the card’s mixer values. Here’s how to make sound initialization work correctly for others with the same sound card, and also for yourself on future Fedora releases.

  1. alsa-info.sh --no-upload (requires that alsa-utils be installed)
  2. Find the section labeled Alsactl output in /tmp/alsa-info.txt.
  3. Play around with the mixer to determine which control in that section was initialized incorrectly, and determine a good initial value for that control.
  4. Make sure you know exactly which sound card is in use; those with builtin motherboard sound and an add-in sound card can get confused here.
  5. Edit /lib/alsa/init/name-of-card to give the control a good initial value.
  6. alsatcl init
  7. If that still isn’t right, go back to step 3.
  8. Once the correct value has been determined, file a bug report and identify the changes you had to make to /lib/alsa/init/name-of-card. Also attach /tmp/alsa-info.txt to the bug report.
  9. Wait for Nirvana to arrive.