Sound disappeared on Dell Inspirion 8100

[Mike Brown]

Michael R. Wayne wrote:

>I had 4.5 installed on my Dell Inspirion 8100 and sound worked OK.
>Then, I upgraded to 4.7 and the machine acted like sound was muted.
>I just upgraded to 4.8 and there has been no change.
>
>Sound works fine under Win2K so the hardware is OK.
>
>The kernel sees the sound card:
>   cat /dev/sndstat
>   FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
>   Installed devices:
>   pcm0: <ESS Technology Maestro3> at io 0xdc00 irq 5 (4p/1r/0v channels duplex)
>
>and I can run programs that use the sound card:
>   mpg123 Heart-Barracuda.mp3
>   High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layer 1, 2 and 3.
>   Version 0.59r (1999/Jun/15). Written and copyrights by Michael Hipp.
>   Uses code from various people. See 'README' for more!
>   THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
>
>   Playing MPEG stream from Heart-Barracuda.mp3 ...
>   MPEG 1.0 layer III, 128 kbit/s, 44100 Hz stereo
>
>but nothing comes out the speakers.
>
>It's as though a mute switch has been hit.  I tried toggling the mute
>(ALT-End), hitting volume up (ALT-Page Up and the buttons near the 
>power switch) with no efect.
>
>I'm at a loss as to what to try next.  Any ideas?
>
>/\/\ \/\/
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>
>  
>
What do you use for a sound driver?  Through all version of FreeBSD I've 
tried on my Inspiron 8200, snd_ich has worked for me each time.  Just 
'kldload snd_ich' or put snd_ich_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf.

The only problem I have with that driver is only one program can access 
the sound card at a time, and I haven't found a way around that yet, if 
anyone has, please let me know :)

-Mike Brown
mwbrown at halfzero.net