Waiting for sound system to respond

[John Caldwell]

Hi, I just installed Freebsd 9.1 with gnome on a dell E6430s, the sound card is IDT High Definition Audio.  It is able to play sound and record sound, as the Sound Recorder works fine.  However the OS has no way to control the sound.  Whenever I click System -> Preferences -> Sound, it will wait 5 seconds and pop up a very small window saying "Waiting for sound system to respond".  If I click Volume Control in the Volume Applet, it will do the same thing.  The volume slider and the Mute button in Volume Control don't work.  Also the hardware buttons to control volume and mute don't work.  Can you advise me what to do?  The following are relevant info as I found other people have provided when debugging sound issues.  Thanks.


$ kldstat -v|grep snd
        270 hdac/snd_hda
        269 pci/snd_hda
        268 hdacc/snd_hda
        267 hdaa/snd_hda_pcm
        266 pci/snd_via8233
        265 pci/snd_ich
        264 pci/snd_es137x
        263 emu10kx/snd_emu10kx_midi
        262 emu10kx/snd_emu10kx_pcm
        261 pci/snd_emu10kx
        260 csa/snd_csapcm
        259 pci/snd_csa
        258 pci/snd_cmi


/boot/loader.conf now contains no entry relating to sound, since now alsa sound modules are built into the kernel so there is no way to load them again (or unload them) any more.

sound entries in /etc/rc.conf:

snddetect_enable="YES"
mixer_enable="YES"
sound_enable="YES"
snd_hda_load="YES"
snd_uaudio_load="YES"


$ cat /dev/sndstat 
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm: 64bit 2009061500/amd64)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <IDT 92HD93BXX (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> (play/rec) default
pcm1: <IDT 92HD93BXX (Analog)> (play/rec)
pcm2: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)
pcm3: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)
pcm4: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)


$ mixer
Mixer vol      is currently set to  90:90
Mixer pcm      is currently set to 100:100
Mixer speaker  is currently set to 100:100
Mixer line     is currently set to 100:100
Mixer mic      is currently set to  67:67
Mixer mix      is currently set to  35:35
Mixer rec      is currently set to  35:35
Mixer ogain    is currently set to 100:100
Recording source: mix


entries in dmesg:

hdacc0: <IDT 92HD93BXX HDA CODEC> at cad 0 on hdac0
hdaa0: <IDT 92HD93BXX Audio Function Group> at nid 1 on hdacc0
pcm0: <IDT 92HD93BXX (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> at nid 13,11 and 10,15 on hdaa0
pcm1: <IDT 92HD93BXX (Analog)> at nid 14 and 17 on hdaa0
hdacc1: <Intel Panther Point HDA CODEC> at cad 3 on hdac0
hdaa1: <Intel Panther Point Audio Function Group> at nid 1 on hdacc1
pcm2: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> at nid 5 on hdaa1
pcm3: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> at nid 6 on hdaa1
pcm4: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> at nid 7 on hdaa1