HowTo: Fix /dev/dsp1

Some games, and other proprietary software (To my knowledge, the ones that use OSS) have it hard-coded in them that the default soundcard, mixer and audio devices are located in the following locations:

/dev/audio
/dev/dsp
/dev/mixer

Although, for a minor few, this isn't the case of their setup.

If, your like me, and you use an external USB Soundcard, and your onboard soundcard is turned off in BIOS. Then your default soundcards may be pointing to these locations instead:

/dev/audio1
/dev/dsp1
/dev/mixer1

To which brings up warning messages in the terminal before the game starts, and ultimately results in no sound ingame.

FIX: Open up the udev rules for alsa. If you are running Jaunty, you'll need to copy the file over:

sudo cp /lib/udev/rules.d/85-alsa-utils.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/85-alsa.rules

gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/85-alsa.rules

and add the following at the bottom:

KERNEL=="controlC[0-9]*", ACTION=="add", \
	RUN+="/sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --background --pidfile /var/run/alsa/bogus --startas /etc/init.d/alsa-utils -- start %n"
[B]KERNEL=="dsp1", SYMLINK+="dsp"
KERNEL=="mixer1", SYMLINK+="mixer"
KERNEL=="audio1", SYMLINK+="audio"[/B]

Save, quit, and reboot your system.

Now when you open up the terminal and type in ls /dev you'll now see the symlinks audio, dsp and mixer.

And you'll finally get sound from that game you got too...

Regards Iain

Dear Learned Guru

Thank you for this brilliant advice.

However, I am sorry to report that it has not improved my problem.

I am in exactly the same position as you apepar to be, concerning USB audio. However, after adding the aforementioned lines of code to the alsa-rules file, I still do not get sound from my USB speakers, and VLC media player still directs all sound to the laptop's onboard speakers via the onboard soundcard.

The output from "#ls /dev" includes the following:```

dsp ptye7 ptyuc rtc ttyb2 ttyr7 ttyx8 dsp1 ptye8 ptyud rtc0 ttyb3 ttyr8 ttyx9

What is wrong with my system? And how can it be corrected?

Thank you for your time.

I found a different solution that works. Ubuntu may be full of bugs, but at least VLC provides a workaround to this seemingly common problem.