In this short tutorial , you will learn how to find your sound card information in a simple way in case your Ubuntu distribution cannot automatically detect it.
What is a sound card?
The sound card is a hardware device that enables your machine to play audio. In this tutorial, you will see how to get details about the sound card hardware and the sound card driver in your Ubuntu distribution.
Read: How to display Graphics card information on Ubuntu 22.04
How to find the sound card using the terminal ?
You just need to type in the command below :
cat /proc/asound/cards
To see the number of cards available, type in the command below :
ls -ld /proc/asound/cards
How to obtain the sound card manufacturer details?
In order to view some details about the manufacturer of the sound card as well as the sound card driver, you would simply need to use the lspci command as follows :
lspci -v | grep -i audio
or using alsamixer tool as shown below :
alsamixer
Which will bring out the screen below :
Read: How to fix sound issues on Ubuntu 18.04
How to check the devices which are connected to the sound card (speakers, microphone ..)?
This can be easily done using the command below :
cat /proc/asound/devices
From the above output, we can see that there is one audio playback device (Speaker) and two audio capture devices (microphones). The remaining details are information related to the sound card.
Read: How to manage sounds using PulseAudio on Ubuntu 18.04
You can also use the aplay command to get device details:
aplay –list-devices
Read: How to view your Linux software and hardware details using the terminal
How can I get the details of the kernel module or sound driver for my sound card?
The module related to the sound card is represented by the snd string in its name. So, if you can look up the /proc/asound/modules file or the output of the lsmod command , you will be able to find out which sound card driver is being used, as shown below :
lsmod | grep snd
If you like the content, we would appreciate your support by buying us a coffee. Thank you so much for your visit and support.
