Tumbleweed. System updated within the last week. PC is new. Sound comes from PC sound output to Logitech sound system–when it comes! Was listening to songs on YouTube when one would not play, and now nothing
from YouTube plays. Tried rebooting, but no help. Is this possibly a Pule Audio problem? Do I need to install some PA app or file to get this back, and if so, what? (I’m new to OpenSUSE, but not to Linux, and I know
that PA is kind of funky.) All assistance gratefully accepted!
–doug
Followup: YouTube still no sound, but I put a CD in the CD drive and it plays fine. Now I’m really confused!
Which browser? The relevant codecs installed?
Further to deano_ferrari’s response … Note that Pulse Audio provides the capability to control sound on a per application basis. So its entirely feasible one can tune their pulse audio such that sound plays from a CD, but will not play from a browser.
The application that many of us use to control sound on a per application basis, is “pulse audio volume control” (pavucontrol). Try installing pulse audio volume control and see if that may be your issue.
I created a blog entry years ago about pulse audio volume control (for openSUSE-11.4) and I believe it is still relevant today with Tumbleweed and latest LEAP.
You can read the explanation on how to use pulse audio volume control (pavucontrol) here: Pulseaudio Basics for openSUSE with pavucontrol Edit Blog Entry
Browser is Firefox. I had made an icon on the screen from the address of Youtube, and it was working, but stopped. I did suspect Pulse Audio, so I followed the previous advice and installed pavucontrol. Opened up
the Youtube icon again, and the PAVUcontrol, and found that in the Playback box, AudioStreamServer: Audio Stream was set to 0, so moved the cursor in it to about 60 % and got good audio from Youtube. However,
when the particular segment of the stream played to the end, the sound stopped again, and the slider was back to 0. This is a pain! I wonder if there is any way to make that performance stop, and leave the slider at
whatever point I set it all the time?
Thanx for the advice!
–doug
This reads like progress. I’ll let others advise further about the pavucontrol sliders though.
Have you surfed the web and tried any of the various solutions to ensure audio volume does not change with pulse audio between application executions? I never use sound the precise way you do wrt a browser icon, so I can not say if that is the issue … nor if it is something else. I can say I have never experienced the behavour you report with pulse audio, hence I can not give you any advice that I have tested and thus be assured it will work for you.
My system ‘just works’.
You could check out the suggestions in these links below, or try surfing yourself and try some of the suggestions.Its really pointless for me to do too much more, as I can not reproduce the issue you have.
- Ubuntu thread - Set default pulseaudio volume
- Debian: Sound settings not saved in Pulse audio [GNOME] - how to save them?
- Fedora - Pulse Audio (pavucontrol) saving volume levels for individual clients
Plus other approaches - which one can try.
Perhaps if I could reproduce your issue I could be more specific, but I can not reproduce it - and there are multiple ways to go about this.
Now things are worse! I tried one of the things from the Ubuntu list (shown above), specifically “alsactl store” and now I have lost the whole second cursor element that used to open in “playback” called
on my laptop Built in audio analog stereo. In other words, there should be TWO cursors under the playback section of PAVU, and there were, yesterday. I don’t know how to get this back. I did a man for
alsactl and there is no command “store” listed, but it certainly did SOMETHING, and the man file shows a command restore, but that did nothing. Now I’m back to no sound at all again.
Apparently, Pulse Audio is a front end to ALSA. I guess what I need now is someone who understands alsa and PA (if anyone actually does!)
The Ubuntu source states that the “fix” will reappear on every boot, so it’s likely to be somewhere in alsa, or even in the boot routine, and I need to know how to get rid of it.
Thanx for any help–doug
Well all settings in any case are stored in your user home directory under ~/.config. Also stuff in ~/.cache may have gotten stuck… clearing pulse and alsa files from those two should bring you back to step 1
Thank you, gogelthorpe! Back to the same routine, where a second slider under Playback, called “AudioIPC Server: AudioStream” comes up when there is a sound source from YouTube on screen. The slider disappears when
there is no sound, and resets to zero when a new sound source from YouTube appears, and then I have to reset the level on that slider ot something that lets me hear the sound. I never had that problem with the Pulse Audio
Volume Control before (with a different OS) and I thought it worked without resetting for a number of songs before it reverted to this behavior. There must be a setting somewhere that fixes that, but I have no idea where to look.
Did look at a big file – man alsactl, since that’s where the sound ceased altogether, but could not figure out where the problem originated. Used KFind to look for "AudioIPC Server, but found nothing, so it must be a line in
some file somewhere. (I seem to recall that there is some command that searches all files for a specific word or word combination, but I can’t find it in “Linux in a Nutshell” so maybe I’m wrong.)
From my laptop, where this problem of resetting the audio to zero when a song ends doesn’t exist, and a link which I found from the net, it appears that this may be controlled from the browser, which in this case is Thunderbird.
More and more mysterious! The app on the laptop is a couple of years old, and it’s possible that it was changed before I installed Tumbleweed–just about a month ago.
I’m digging i to Google to see if I can find anything I can understand, and if I do, I will report back. Meantime I will be very happy to hear from someone who has been there and fixed that!
–doug
gogalthorp suggestion to look in the /home/yourusername/.config is a good idea. You could for example rename the directory /home/yourusername/.config/pulse to say "pulse-not-work-well’ and next time you restart pulse (such as a reboot) that will be recreated with default settings that you can then tune. The advantage of renaming (instead of deleting) is one can always restore the old file.
I do not know where openSUSE stores information from alsactl. It used to be in an "asound’ (or “asound.state” ) file located somewhere … but I am not up to date wrt how this integrates with pulse audio.
Note also, one can tune the underlying alsa volume settings, by running as a regular user (in a konsole/xterm) “alsamixer”. Then use the ‘arrow’ keys and the ‘function’ keys to navigate in that konsole/xterm alsamixer menu.
It would be a lot easier for us if we were sitting down at your PC, … unfortunately such is not possible.
While not Tumbleweed, I note for LEAP-15.1, according to the manual :
The volume and configuration of all sound cards are saved when you click OK and leave the YaST sound module. The mixer settings are saved to the file /etc/asound.state . The ALSA configuration data is appended to the end of the file /etc/modprobe.d/sound and written to **/etc/sysconfig/sound ** .
Possibly that could be a place to start looking if the renaming in ~/.config of the pulse directory did not help.
.
You mentioned ‘thunderbird’ when referencing your browser, but that’s an email client. Perhaps you meant ‘firefox’. A thread describing similar behaviour with PA…
https://askubuntu.com/questions/967061/firefox-keeps-resetting-pulse-volume-to-0
It was found that deleting the existing Mozilla profile solved the user’s issue. You could try renaming the ~/.mozilla directory, then restart Firefox and see if that eliminates the unwanted behaviour.
Usually if I encounter volume problems I always solve with Pvucontrol, I saw that there has already been mentioned there is a setting in> configuration> internal audio> find a drop-down menu, try to change the output (mine works fine with “Analogic Stereo”) or you can also intervene from Yast> Harware> sound, you can also disable Pulseaudio using Alsa, good work