Ubuntu Wiki

Sometimes upgrading sound drivers will help you fix an issue with your sound. There are several ways to upgrade your ALSA sound drivers.

First, some words of caution:

Make sure you only have one override of ALSA drivers installed at a time. Make sure you uninstall the previous override before trying a new one, otherwise it is unclear which version will take precedence.

Aside from the Ubuntu web, there are several guides, scripts, and blog posts about how to download, compile, and install newer ALSA driver versions yourself. These guides are of varying quality, and in some cases, can break your system really bad. We do not recommend them - the solutions suggested below are simpler and come with proper uninstall instructions.

=== The latest stable ALSA - simplest === /* This currently does not make sense for Natty (Ubuntu 11.04) or One since the latest upstream ALSA release is in Natty already. /* Whenever a stable release of ALSA is released, the linux-backports-modules-alsa-[Ubuntu Release]-[Kernel Flavor] is updated. [Ubuntu-release] means "karmic", "lucid", "maverick" etc, and [Kernel Flavor] normally means "generic" (or "server" for Ubuntu server edition). So just download and install this package, reboot, and test. Uninstallation, if necessary, is just as simple - just uninstall the package and reboot afterwards. */ /* === Prebuilt daily snapshot modules === /* Every night the current ALSA snapshot is taken and built on Launchpad by the Ubuntu Audio Developers Team. This will give you the absolute latest. See this link for how to install them. */

DKMS - rebuilds automatically

The only currently supported option is to use DKMS packages. They can be constructed that automatically rebuilds themselves whenever a new kernel is installed. See this link for how to install them.