I’ve been having some issues with the sound on my current installation that I can’t seem to rectify in any way. I’ve followed several guides on various topics but things just don’t work out like I want them to.
My sound-devices:
Built-in sound-card on motherboard: HDA Nvidia (ALC885)
Yamaha AP-U70 (external stereo-amplifier which connects via USB and acts as an extra sound card)
There’s a built-in mic on my Logitech EyeToy as well, which the os detects
The built-in sound chip seems to work ok. “speaker-test” works, system-sounds work etc. but there are strange things happening. If I’m in Krusader and want to preview a song, krusaders preview-app works fine. If I double-click to play it in mplayer, mplayer complains that it cannot open/initialize audio. If I press “stop” and then “play” it plays just fine. Amarok doesn’t give me any sound what-so-ever. I get no sound in Flash either.
Since I have no knowledge about sound and sound devices in linux, I was wondering if there would be a way for me to uninstall anything that has to do with sound-cards on my system, and then re-install everything piece-by-piece to get a better overview over what’s happening and where the problem lies? Is there a guide? What should I uninstall or delete from my system? In what order? What should I install after that and in what order?
The related packages I know are installed now are:
ALSA
phonon
gstreamer
pulse
You’ve touched on various issues, and you could be looking at many minor problems.
For example, Amarok as packaged by Novell/SuSE-GmbH is mostly crippled for proprietary multimedia (such as mp3). Typically with Amarok one can choose either a gstreamer/phonon or an xine sound engine.
I typically recommend users utilize the version of both amarok and libxine1 packaged by Packman, to obtain good sound in Amarok. One can do that by adding 4 respositories to their software package manager (to make their multimedia application/codec updating easy) and then update one’s apps. The 4 repositories (repos) are OSS, Non-OSS, Update, and Packman. Just those 4. No others. None. Only add others if one understands the risks involved, the things that can break, and how to work around any breakage or dependency problems. Typically this ability to work around such problems (from having too many repos) is well beyond that of new users to identify and solve, and often beyond that of average users. There is guidance here for adding those 4 repos to 11.1: Repositories/11.1 - openSUSE-Community Again, only oss, non-oss, update and Packman.
Once those 4 are added, with one’s PC connected to the internet, go to YaST > Softare > Software management and set the “filter” to “search” and search for and install the following apps packaged by Packman: amarok, amarok-xine, amarok-packman, libxine1, xine-ui, w32codec-all, libffmpeg0. Do not substitute Novell nor videlan packaged apps for the Packman apps.
Then after that is complete, go to amarok and select the xine sound engine.
First off, only setup the 4 repos that I recommend. If you had others selected, remove them.
Then Simply check to see where the application comes from.
Typically a “packman application” will have “pm” as part of the versioning.
One way to tell a videolan app under YaST Software Management is to look under the Technical Data Tab, where there is a URL listed. If that URL is videolan, you know the rpm is from videolan.
Sorry, I think I misunderstood. I thought you meant that if I already have some of those packages and dependencies from other repos, I should leave them alone. But I’m guessing what you say is simply don’t install from other repos, and I’m guessing I should replace already installed packages with their Packman-versions instead?
I downloaded, replaced etc., and all packages you mentioned are now from Packman. In Amarok I chose Xine, and configured “alsa” as output-plugin. Amarok works. Thank you
mPlayer though, still doesn’t want to play nice with me. When I double-click on an associated file typ, mplayer pops up a message saying it “cannot open/initialize audio”. If I click “stop” and then “play” with the invoked window still open, it plays the audio just fine. This happens every time.
I understand a lot of other mediaplayers uses mplayer (I could very well be wrong, if so please correct me), so I’m guessing I can’t just remove it or I’ll break other applications …
Now that I have xine installed, and working well with alsa, should I uninstall other things? gstreamer? pulse? phonon (i’m guessing that’s a no-no but if you don’t ask you will never know)?
SMPlayer was a nice aquaintance, however it behaved the same way. Start -> Stop -> Play …
I was thinking more in the lines of “these things work, let’s keep them. These don’t, so let’s throw them out and get less mess”, but you’re probably right. Besides, there’s probably a chance of other things messing up if I know myself right.
