I’ve been reluctant to post regarding this topic as I have tried and retried all of the “noob solutions” to get flash sound working but no luck- I need help! I suspect that it has to do with my system showing two sound cards (0 and 1) ; I tried different asoundrc file options from the ALSA Wiki but no luck. I am still left with Flash=No Audio. Please if anyone can hold my hand on this it would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
It would be helpful to provide some info about your system: openSUSE release and any non-default s/w e.g. kernel; KDE or Gnome, and version; any relevant h/w e.g. sound card/chip. Does your other audio work, or just fails with Flash audio/video? Where did you install Flash from?
Whoever tries to help will need those answers at least. 
System: openSUSE 11.3 (i586)
KDE: 4.5.2 (KDE 4.5.2)
Flash is from Open Suse
I don’t really have any exotic SW in my set-up.
Sound works fine on everything else. VLC, SM Player, Amarok, etc all okay!
Only issue is that Sound in these programs switches from HDMI out and other times it will play on S/PDIF out (I would like to configure all to play on S/PDIF out). Thats why I suspected after reading in the forums that perhaps the Flash no sound problem is related to an ALSA sound channel issue. Any advice on this would be appreciated.
Regards
I beg to differ. KDE 4.5.2 is exotic enough, given 11.3 comes with KDE 4.4.4 that probably received more testing.
And the two sound cards make/model?
BTW did you read this thread for some ideas? Probably not your h/w, or not even Flash, but turned out to be auto config problems, and it also mentions issues with video losing sound versus audio. Also note the tests on the last page. You may have been there before though…
I am also assuming you checked mixer - KMix (via speaker icon in system tray). When Flash started up without sound on mine (IIRC after a recent KDE upgrade), PCM in KMix had dropped to zero level, and was fixed by increasing the level as needed.
Yes I have explored most of the obvious options such as kmixer, playing with soundcard options in Yast and in the KDE desktop settings- no luck!
This sound issue existed on clean installs of OpenSuse 11.3 64bit and 32bit on two machines (with same hardware config). I troubleshooted similar issue in 11.2 and got fixed but no luck with 11.3…
I am willing to do a fresh stall again of 11.3 if someone is willing to trouble shoot this with me.
On 11.3, the obvious causes of flash not playing sound are
I prefer not helping users with the KDE version > the official SuSE-GmbH provided and supported version (where the supported version is 4.4.4 for 11.3) in this case, as such KDE releases can introduce other causes that I am not aware of and hence I can not support. However having typed that, other than to offer the above note for the obvious causes, there is not much more I can provide for a suggestion.
Hi OldCpu,
Thanks for this checklist I will use it now in all future trouble shootings. Even though I am almost up to a hundred posts after this I still feel like a total noob. It turns out that after going through the list again. I was more thorough in the KMIX settings and moved all the channels to visible and turned them all up. This did the trick and now Flash has sound again. Thanks again for helping!
Regards,
Glad to read its working.
Hmm, I gave you the hint about KMix, but you ignored it!
Indeed you did! I wish I had focused more on that suggestion at the time would have saved me some headache! But after encountering this problem several times I thought the most obvious solution here was moving the PCM channel volume up which usually solves things. This time was a bit different and I discovered something that I overlooked the first time. When I went back to KMIX the IEC958 was muted. When I clicked unmute everything worked again! Thanks for your help and effort. I was trying to look for a difficult answer to this problem when all it required was a simple one. In regards to the dual sound card issue this seems also to be resolved. I was confused and thinking that some formats have 5.1 sound and some have dual channel which will make them play and be picked up differently by the system (HDMI or S/PDIF). Now having done this uncheck of the IEC958 I find that no matter the format it will be routed through the S/PDIF, of course in case of 5.1 sound it will be on all my speakers and two channel sound will only be on two speakers. OldCpu did in past point to a method of configuring the ALSA file to put dual channel sound on all the speakers but it looks too complex for me at the moment. But happy now again have a working system!!!
Regards
Thank you for the feedback - the detail may well help another user searching here with a similar problem and/or configuration. When there are many components to a problem, as there are with pc audio, it’s often the simple setting that gets overlooked. I’ve done that too many times over the years to count! I have mostly been lucky with sound on openSUSE working OOTB but when it stopped, after an update/upgrade or adding new applications, it’s usually been down to a KMix setting even if the real fault lies in other s/w components. I’m glad you solved that and the dual card issue.
I got the impression from your first post that you had already picked up on some of oldcpu’s advice/guidance. We are fortunate to have it, and also that he is still prepared to assist users with those intricacies, even on the more basic sound issues. 