I finally got sound out of my digital output on my soundcard under Linux! I’ve been trying various distributions to no avail and finally got it to work under Suse 10.1. Now, I don’t think this is really distribution-dependent but that just happens to be the one that I actually got it working under and the one I happned to be running when I finally decided I was going to get this shit working at any cost.
Basically, I have an Asus A8N-E motherboard with onboard Nforce4 audio. I don’t use the analog outputs for anything but headphones because I have an optical digital cable running to my home theater receiver. Thus, I wanted to get the optical output working. Well, I had read that I had to enable the IEC 958 output in the mixer app and that should do the trick. That in and of itself didn’t do jack shit for me, unfortunately. I still only had sound on my analog outputs. Well, eventually in doing some more reading, I found an obscure reference to a horizontal slider in “gamix”, which is a mixer app for gnome (It will run under KDE). Sure enough, there’s a horizontal slider under “output” that I had to slide all the way to the left and poof, I had sound on my digital output. I didn’t even have to install the nvidia linux drivers to get sound working. Strangely, in KMix there’s a slider for the IEC958 Playback that you have to slide all the way DOWN in order to get sound from the digital outputs. Completely contrary to what one might think. Stupid Linux! Either way, everything is working so I’m happy now.
So for those of you in KDE and using KMix, slide the IEC958 slider all the way down and under the “switches” tab, make sure the playback source is set to PCM. Once you do that, everything should work. Remember that on the digital out none of the volume sliders have any effect on anything since of course it’s sending a raw digital signal to the receiver.