No sound is some apps

English Multimedia
1

Recently installed a system with 11.1-x64 and KDE4. My sound “seems” to be working perfectly - except for many of the games:

sdlmame - No sound
gcompris - No sound (I’ve installed the English pack and tried to start with the -s option, but still nothing)
Abuse - Won’t even start. Gives this error:

Sound : Disabled (couldn't find the sfx directory)

bsnes - Sound is choppy
blob wars - no sound
The list goes on…

All movies and sound files played in vlc and/or smplayer work perfectly, as well as system sounds such as the startup noise, etc.

I notice that when I go into the KDE4 System Settings -> Multimedia Settings there are many “Output Devices”. The first two are:
HDA NVidia (STAC92xx Analog)
HDA NVidia (STAC92xx Digital)

When I hit the “Test” button on the analog one, the sound plays fine, but when I hit it for the digital one, I hear nothing.

I have no idea if these two things are related, but I’m at a loss. I previously had Suse 11.1-x64 installed on this exact computer with KDE3.5, and sound worked perfectly in all applications including games.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to list as much information as possible. If there is anything else I can provide, please let me know.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

2

That you say:

All movies and sound files played in vlc and/or smplayer work perfectly, as well as system sounds such as the startup noise, etc.
Seems to indicate sound is working, but maybe you need to configure sound specifically in these other apps. I’m sure @oldcpu will be along soon, he’s the sound guru

3

Except I know nothing about sound for games.

The only game I play on my PC is chess, and I dislike sound from a chess program, so I ensured that sound option was deselected. :slight_smile:

4

O.K., this is embarrassing…

I must have inadvertently added the Videolan repository (along with Packman). Turns out some of the Videolan stuff has strange pulseaudio dependencies that was causing my problem.

I uninstalled pulseaudio, which made the sound work in games again but got me caught in dependency hell between the videolan and packman repositories, so I just reinstalled the entire system (It was a fresh install anyway) and made sure not to add the Videolan Repo.

All is working fine now.

Sorry to bother everyone with a rookie mistake. Thank you for your input.