Sound card (almost) working, but no sound in KDE apps

English Hardware
1

My Computer is a HP Pavilion m9584de with an x86_64 openSuSE 11.1.
Details from tsalsa can be found at tsalsa.txt - nopaste.com (beta).

The onboard sound chip seems to be recognized, but the KPE applications remain mute.

aplay /usr/share/sounds/login.wav works.
alsaplayer /usr/share/sounds/login.wav works.
artsplay /usr/share/sounds/login.wav remains mute.
In kcontrol (Sound & Multimedia -> Sound-System) there is a test button (German label text “Sound testen”). It does not produce any sound.

When I kill the artsd in a terminal window and restart it as nohup /opt/kde3/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 3 -m artsmessage -c drkonqi -l 3 -f &, all above commands play the sound, including artsd and the “Sound testen” button in kcontrol.
If I restart artsd by changing and saving values in kcontrol, the KDE applications are mute again.

Thus, it looks like artsd has some kind of problem when started by kdeinit.
Any suggestions or help to solve this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
cetz

2

What are KPE applications? Do you mean KDE applications? Specifically, what KDE applications? Do you get sound from applications such as vlc, xine-ui, smplayer, amarok ?

Amixer contents for card 0 [SB] _____________________________________
amixer set ‘Surround’,0 0%,0% on
amixer set ‘Center’,0 0% on
amixer set ‘LFE’,0 0% on
amixer set ‘Side’,0 0%,0% on
amixer set ‘Line’,0 0%,0% on

Do you have a 5.1 surround sound system? I note you have surround sound ON, but the volume levels at 0%. If I apply that setting to my Asus P6T motherboard (which has different hardware) I would get no sound, and I need to move up the volume in my surround sound settings.

3

Sure, I meant KDE applications (don’t know how I could mix up these keys [pretty far from each other] :)).

No sound comes from konqueror (for warnings etc.), kreversi, kpoker, etc.
Sound is produced by kaffeine for example.

Looks like applications work, that bypass the artsd (but I’m not sure about this).

No, I have no surround system. It’s just a pair of standard stereo boxes being connected to the sound card.

And – as mentioned earlier – all applications produce sound, if and only if I start artsd manually.

4

It reads like its just your KDE4 system sound that are causing problems. I’m not a KDE4 user (I use KDE-3.5.10), so I can not help there. Good luck.

5

I’m also using KDE3, because I missed some features in KDE4.

In the meantime, I succeeded using the sound, after these changes:

  • I double-checked that I have no KDE4 components, found some, and uninstalled them.
  • I re-installed pulse-audio, after I had uninstalled it earlier, because some internet research made me believe, that it might be the cause of my problems.
  • I browsed through the recommended packages in Yast and installed everything, that seemed to be related to ALSA or PULSE sound.

After that, the sound works fine.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell which action led to the success.

Any way – thank you for your support,
cetz

6

Glad to read its working, and that were were successful in re-installing pulse.

Your comment about pulse being removed, provides a correlation as to why you needed to mess with aRts deamon. Sound-concepts - openSUSE