No Sound in certain Applications

English Hardware
#1

I have a Problem with Sound in certain Applications, such as Firefox (e.g. Youtube) or speaker-test.

Running speaker-test i get the following output:


jens@Saruman:~> speaker-test 

speaker-test 1.0.16

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 1 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise                   
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:996:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: -2,Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden   
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:996:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: -2,Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden

“Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden” means “File or Directory not found”. Problem stays the same, running as root - therefor it should be not a rights problem.

Sound is working in other Applications, such as Amarok or in Desktop Environment (KDE 4.1 using phonon-xine).

System:

AMD 64 3200+
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS
OpenSUSE 11.0 KDE 4.1

Thanks in Advance!

#2

Hmmm…i now remember: the Problem started, when i changed my gfxcard. This added a new HDMI Audio device. But even if this is the origin, i don’t know how to fix it.

#3

Youtube requires flash. On my PCs to play the Youtube flash, in addition to the Novell/SuSE-GmbH packaged flash-player I use ONLY packman packaged mplayerplug-in with the packman packaged MPlayer. In fact for multimedia I only use Packman packaged rpms. Mixing Packman packaged with videolan packaged apps is IMHO fraught with unpredictable problems.

To learn more about what multimedia apps you have installed, you could type:
rpm -qa | grep xine
rpm -qa | grep layer
rpm -q amarok

How does a speaker test work that has more arguments? Such as:
speaker-test -Dplug:front -c2 -l5 -twav
Try that as both a regular user, and also with root permissions.

To learn more about your audio hardware/software, you can run a diagnostic script. Guidance on how to do that is located here:
Diagnostic scripts to run to obtain more information

You state sound is working in other apps such as Amarok … what sound engine have you selected in Amarok? What sound engine have you selected in all of your multimedia apps?

#4

Thanks for your reply - actually you brought me on the right way to the solution of my problem.

I forgot to configure alsa after installing the new gfxcard which brought another sound device. Configuring sound in KDEs systemsettings was not enough - i had to set my soundcard as primary device in yast. Now everything works well again. Thank you very much.