Audio in some programs only

English Multimedia
1

Hi. I’ve finally got round to setting up my speakers and am now experiencing a slightly odd sound problem; some programs run sound perfectly, whereas some are completely silent. For example, running mplayer from command line produces sound, whereas wine, flash, kaffeine, system sounds, etc, are silent. I’m assuming this is likely a pulseaudio problem, and I’ve ran through the things suggested on the suse troubleshooting page for that, but haven’t had any luck :frowning:

Info as requested by sticky:

/usr/sbin/alsa-info output is at: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=e339ef42f9e6cfc79222fde787a40b55d15bb61b

rpm -qa ‘*alsa’ output:


alsa-plugins-pulse-1.0.24-6.1.i586
alsa-firmware-1.0.24.1-3.1.noarch
alsa-oss-1.0.17-32.1.i586
alsa-utils-1.0.24.2-3.1.i586
alsa-devel-1.0.24.1-4.9.1.i586
alsa-plugins-1.0.24-6.1.i586
alsa-1.0.24.1-4.9.1.i586

rpm -qa ‘pulse’ output:


pulseaudio-utils-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
alsa-plugins-pulse-1.0.24-6.1.i586
libpulse0-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
libpulse-mainloop-glib0-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-module-zeroconf-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-module-x11-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-module-jack-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
libpulse-browse0-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-esound-compat-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
pulseaudio-module-lirc-0.9.22-6.11.1.i586
libxine1-pulse-1.1.19-4.4.i586

rpm -q libasound2 output:


libasound2-1.0.24.1-4.9.1.i586

uname -a output:


Linux linux-wstw 2.6.37.6-0.7-default #1 SMP 2011-07-21 02:17:24 +0200 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

cat /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf output:


options snd slots=snd-hda-intel,snd-hda-intel
# 5Dex.QKNZxmNVeT7:SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
# NXNs.t57_yxVsy26:nVidia Corporation
alias snd-card-1 snd-hda-intel

Anyone got any ideas how to fix this?

2

Hei!

Are you on KDE or Gnome? If you are on KDE you may want to disable Pulseaudio from within YaST: ‘YaST Control Centre > Hardware > Sound’, and see how that goes.

3

Huh.

I tried disabling PulseAudio as you suggested; that, unfortunately, had the effect of disabling the few programs that had previously working sound. I changed it back, but still no working sound on either group of programs. I then checked pavucontrol, to see if maybe the volume had been muted or something by disabling pulse audio, and noticed that it was set to prioritise the wrong sound card (a HDMI output card which I’m not using.) I disabled this, received an error message from KDE along the lines of 'Audio Device not working, falling back on 5.1 Surround Sound (i.e, my other sound card) and suddenly all the sound started working.

I’m sure I had it set to that beforehand, so whether flipping pulseaudio on/off changed something or if I simply didn’t notice I had it set to the wrong sound card, I have no idea. Either way, audio is now working perfectly :smiley:

Thanks :slight_smile:

4

Thats nice:)

I suppose muting may be what had happened when you disabled pulseaudio as well. Kmix does sometimes mute channels after changes has been made to the phonon/audio device settings, a bit by random it seems to me. Sometimes, for instance, kmix will have muted the PCM channel by default after a fresh install, sometimes not. The PCM channel isn’t always set up to be viewable either, so to adjust the fader or mute/demute the PCM channel one has to add it to the ‘viewable channels’ list.

Cheers

5

Use kmix to make sure main and PCM lines are not muted. What is your Phonon backend? Install and use VLC backend anyway. Your apps should be configured to use either phonon or pulseaudio or resort to ESD, because pulseaudio running is known to block ALSA and OSS Api acess.
Install and run alsamixer. Make sure channels are not muted there, though volume must be zero in this app.
Are you sure you didn’t accidentaly redirected front channels to back?