Advanced Linux Sound Architecture

ALSA is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing device drivers for sound cards.

ALSA has the following significant features:

* Efficient support for all types of audio interfaces, from consumer sound cards to professional multichannel audio interfaces.

* Fully modularized sound drivers.

* SMP and thread-safe design.

* User space library (alsa-lib) to simplify application programming and provide higher level functionality.

* Support for the older Open Sound System (OSS) API, providing binary compatibility for most OSS programs.

If you are experiencing sound issues on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 or just want the latest version, you may want to upgrade to ALSA 1.0.20. I had a sound problem in my HP compaq laptop CQ510 when using Jaunty.. this solved the problem so just re wrote the article here...

Here  is how I updated......

To do this, we must begin by determining our version of alsa as follows :


cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.18rc3.

To avoid problems during the upgrade of Alsa-utils, we need to stop it with the following command :

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop

We must then install the necessary tools to compile along with the kernel headers :

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential ncurses-dev gettext xmlto libasound2-dev
sudo apt-get -y install linux-headers-`uname -r` libncursesw5-dev


Some of these may be already installed and some may not be necessary for your distro, either the case just skip those. Then, we go in our personal folder and download alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils :

cd ~
rm -rf ~/alsa* ~/.pulse*
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/lib/alsa-lib-1.0.20.tar.bz2
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/utils/alsa-utils-1.0.20.tar.bz2

After that, we create a new folder for the compilation and installation of the 3 files. Then, we move the 3 tar files that we just downloaded in this folder :

sudo rm -rf /usr/src/alsa
sudo mkdir -p /usr/src/alsa
cd /usr/src/alsa
sudo cp ~/alsa* .

Unpack the 3 tar files :

sudo tar xjf alsa-driver*
sudo tar xjf alsa-lib*
sudo tar xjf alsa-utils*

We compile and install alsa-driver :

cd alsa-driver*
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

We compile and install alsa-lib :

cd ../alsa-lib*
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

We compile and install alsa-utils :

cd ../alsa-utils*
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

Then, we remove the 3 tar files in our personal folder that are not anymore necessary :

rm -f ~/alsa-driver*
rm -f ~/alsa-lib*
rm -f ~/alsa-utils*

Then, just restart your computer and your alsa version should be 1.0.20!
You can verify that you have now indeed have this version of alsa :

cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.20.
Compiled on May 9 2009 for kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (SMP).

Just to be sure everything is well configured, execute this command :

sudo alsaconf


the codes were taken from
  monospace