ALSA -- unknown soundcard oxygen

Question

So I'm sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I'm having some trouble with a Fedora 25 install (4.10.12-200.fc25.x86_64) where I want to get my Xonar DGX sound card working. I've pretty much been following the steps provided here, but I'm getting stuck at the following line trying to install the alsa-driver package:

./configure --with-cards=oxygen --with-sequencer=yes ; make ; make install

The problem is with the configure script. It eventually errors out with:

checking for which soundcards to compile driver for... configure: error: Unknown soundcard oxygen

Checking in at /proc/asound/cards I have the following entry first:

 0 [DGX            ]: CMI8786 - Xonar DGX
                  C-Media Oxygen HD Audio at 0xc000, irq 18

Which is the sound card. In addition, running the command:

lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"

returns the following output (truncating to last entry for convenience of reading)

...
05:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8788 [Oxygen HD Audio]
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8521
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18
I/O ports at c000 [size=256]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: snd_oxygen
Kernel modules: snd_oxygen

I have tried things such as changing the with-cards argument to be snd_oxygen or snd-oxygen, and have spent hours at this point trying to figure out how to do this.

In fact, I have even tried skipping the driver portion of the install, since according to alsa project dot org (removed hyperlink to add image since I do not have reputation) the package is now obsolete. However this doesn't seem to be the right course of action, because I still am not getting sound.

One other note is that I can in fact see the device in alsamixer if I select it.

As I said, this is my first bare-metal Fedora install so I may be doing something simple wrong somehow, but at this point I don't know where else to turn. Any help in pointing me in the right direction is greatly appreciated, thank you very much for taking the time to read and help. I can also provide more information if it is necessary. Thank you.

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EDIT: Providing screenshot of alsamixer screen when selecting the Xonar DGX Sound card. I notice that the two input channels are muted, but does that mean anything? Also what is S/PDIF? I can unmute it, but there are no numbers, unlike with Headphone. For reference, I have plugged in speakers directly to the soundcard. Any help that you can provide (pointing me in the right direction or anything) is hugely appreciated. Thanks so much.

alsamixer

Answer 1

The Xonar DG(X) has three different output configurations, which can be selected with the "Analog Output" mixer control. You have to change it if you are not using headphones at the front panel connector.

Answer 2

1) If your Xonar sound card already shows up in /proc/asound/cards, you don't need to compile a kernel driver for it - the drivers included in your kernel are already working out of the box.

2) If you are running Pulseaudio, it will automatically use all available ALSA cards, and prevent ALSA applications from using them directly (so don't try to specify hw:1,0 etc. in their configuration) To allow old ALSA applications to work with Pulseaudio, Pulseaudio includes an ALSA compatibility layer usually of ALSA device(s) called pulse that will connect all ALSA applications to Pulseaudio. So having this a the default is completely correct, no need to change it.

Pulseaudio will also manage most of your alsamixer settings, no need to change anything there unless for some reason things don't work.

3) To control Pulseaudio applications, start pavucontrol (some desktops have a subset of this somewhere in a "sound panel" or similar). If you start an application that uses Pulseaudio or ALSA to output sound, it will show up under "Playback", and you can select which card ("audio sink" in Pulseaudio terms) it should use. All sinks are listed under Output Devices. Some soundcard support different configurations with different combination of sources/sinks, select the one you want under "Configuration". pavucontrol includes a volume meter, so you should see activity.

If you can't get sound output to work with pavucontrol, please update your question with the output of pacmd list-sinks | grep name: and amixer -c0 contents (in a pastebin, if this is too long), assuming the the Xonar card is still card number 0.