How do I display the name of my audio card driver from the command line in Lubuntu 11.10?

Question

I am running Lubuntu 11.10 and I want to display my audio / sound card driver from the command line.

Solution 1

To find out what sound drivers are loaded, look for drivers containing snd and their dependencies (assuming your sound driver is part of the ALSA framework; most are):

/sbin/lsmod | grep snd

For example, my PC has an Intel sound chip, and amongst the dependencies of the snd module is the snd_hda_intel module, which is my chip's driver.

You can also ask the ALSA tools. And to see the chip identification (independently of any driver), use lspci (or lsusb, if it's an external sound device over USB).

Solution 2

ALSA's aplay can list devices; a card may contain several devices, though:

$ aplay --list-devices
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: AD198x Digital [AD198x Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Solution 3

Use lspci -v. For example:

00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB4x0 High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
        [...]
        Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel

Comments

[Minh Nghĩa]

I have a ALC668 "Analog", it shows up as snd_hda_codec_realtek when doing /sbin/lsmod | grep snd, and there's no corresponding entry in lspci. How the chip connects to the chipset without using PCI is unknown to me. So somehow lspci check is not really reliable.