Ever since I installed my opensuse11.4 two weeks ago, I’ve had problems with audio.
I never got my internal Intel ICH9 82801I (ALC883 Analog) to show up in phonon.
I suspect the behaviour your encountered with pulse audio is hardware specific and maybe related to the ALC883 hardware audio codec that is in your PC. I do not have such behaviour in one openSUSE-11.4 installation (where the PC has analog and HDMI), nor in 2 other PCs that I tested with liveCDs
I do note that the kernel module was updated to fix some problems with different hardware audio codecs, and there is also an updated alsa version available (in a special sound packagers/alsa-developers repository), and so it sort of begs the question, what kernel do you have installed with your openSUSE-11.4 ? and what alsa versions ? ie what is the output of:
With pulse enabled (and after restarting the alsa sound driver - reboot is easiest), what is the output of this command:
aplay -l
or better than that, with pulse enabled, what is the output website/URL (which will have PCs uploaded sound configuration) of running this command with PC connected to internet:
/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh
Also, are you using the ‘stock’ KDE-4.6.0 version delivered with 11.4, or have you installed some newer version?
On openSUSE-11.4 with pulse audio enabled, I find installing the application ‘pavucontrol’ and then using that to tune one’s input/output devices and volume levels works well. It is important in the output-devices tab to select SHOW ‘all devices’ and in the playback tab to select SHOW ‘all streams’.
This sounds a lot like the problem I had. ( See “OKm how just sound actually work” and “Flash NFS and Gstreamer/Xine”
earlier in this forum …)
Despite have trouble with my own native language I fixed mine by removing phonon-backend-gstreamer
and phonon-backend-xine and adding phonon-backend-vlc everything worked hunky dory after that … I have
no idea why, which bugs me but there you go.
I noticed you have an Nvidia card with a HDMI sound out and a Intel on board sound chip set, that seems to be a
contributing factor. I don’t get this problem on older Nvidia cards with no hdmi or on ATI cards.
I would be very interested if what I did works for you. BTW once you get rid of the all the phonon backends except
vlc Yast seems very keen to put them back on at any opportunity
So I don’t have to uninstall pulseaudio after all then?
On a more serious note I can see where people might think they’re only able to use hdmi audio, kmix seems to only show hdmi audio when hdmi is available, I generally install pavucontrol and it takes seconds to make sure that hdmi isn’t set as the default sound output in Yast
Speaking of Yast, in Yast > Hardware > Sound > Other is a Pulse Audio Configuration entry, clicking on it allows one to disable pulse which is perhaps a more sensible option than removing pulse audio altogether … not all sound issues are caused by pulse
Seems to me pulse is a bit like akonadi in a way though, might eventually be as great as promised but seems far from it as yet
Agreed it’s far from perfect at the moment but in comparison to aRts from KDE3 it’s like a new world wonder Anyway akonadi and aRts are a bit different in my opinion because they are/were developed by the KDE team as far as I know and pulseaudio has got nothing to do with KDE as far as I know.
I just meant that to an extent they’re both still a work in progress, both have improved (in my experiences anyway) since I first came across them and I should imagine they will continue to do so
I fixed mine by removing phonon-backend-gstreamer
so I think You might be jumping to untrue conclusions.