Comment 4 for bug 11134

(In reply to comment #2)
> I also blacklisted the intel ac97 drivers in /etc/hotplug/blacklist that
seemed to be causing a
> few problems. This was called sndintel8x0 and seems to be unneccesary for my
system. I also had
> to do ln -s /dev/audio1 /dev/dsp to get any sound, period.

If snd-intel8x0 was being loaded, it's because you have an i810-based sound
device in your system. It seems likely that your system has onboard sound in
addition to the Sound Blaster card.
Please explain the problems that you saw before, and why you believed them to be
caused by the ac97 driver.

> Sound card: Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1
>
> Sound Blaster Live! (rev.7) at 0xb800, irq 9
> Intel 82801AA-ICH at 0xe000, irq 3
>
> Audio devices:
> 0: EMU10K1 (DUPLEX)
> 1: Intel 82801AA-ICH (DUPLEX)

As you can see, you do indeed seem to have two sound devices. If you don't wish
to use the onboard sound, you may wish to disable it in the BIOS, thus avoiding
any issues with drivers or selection of the default audio device (see bug#8050).

> Synth devices:
> 0: Emu10k1
>
> Midi devices:
> 0: EMU10K1 MPU-401 (UART)

Your Sound Blaster's MIDI device is recognized and an appropriate driver is
loaded, so I presume you have /dev/sequencer now?
You also said that kmid appeared to play, so I assume so. Otherwise I would
expect it to print an error if /dev/sequencer was missing, unless it's using
ALSA directly.
Check the mixer and ensure that the appropriate channels are unmuted, etc. The
Sound Blaster Live! can be tricky to configure in this respect, since it has a
very large number of mixer controls.

In the future when providing large files, please attach them rather than pasting
them into a comment. This makes the bug information easier to read and access.

I assume you added those modules to /etc/modules so that your Sound Blaster
would be the primary sound device. I recommend the following:

- Remove all audio modules from /etc/modules
- Disable your onboard sound device in your BIOS setup
- Boot the system normally

Check that /dev/dsp exists and that sound works. Then try MIDI.