Comment 2 for bug 33420

I was just experiencing this problem myself. Hardware is a Dell 700m laptop.

Alsa programs were giving output similar to:

will@lappy:~$ amixer
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1107:(snd_func_refer) Unable to find definition 'defaults.ctl.card'
ALSA lib conf.c:3493:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:242:(snd_func_getenv) error evaluating default
ALSA lib conf.c:3493:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_getenv returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:3962:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib control.c:817:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL default
amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such file or directory

My original .asoundrc.asoundconf contained only the following non-comment line:

!defaults.pcm.card I82801DBICH4

Manually adding the following fixed it:

!defaults.ctl.card I82801DBICH4

Also just removing the line from .asoundrc that references .asoundrc.asoundconf fixes the entire issue.