I'm very confused. If I run the gnome sound control, test speakers works fine. If I run "play", the sound plays normally. If I run "aplay", I got no sound till I rebooted, then aplay started to work, but if I run mplayer or youtube in google-chrome, I still get no sound.
The gnome sound control "Applications" list does show mplayer or chrome as an app using sound, the apps don't give any apparent errors, all the messages from mplayer with all the details of what it is doing seem to indicate it is talking to the pulseaudio daemon OK, but there is no sound.
What is going on? Everyone thinks the volume is cranked up, nothing is muted.
On Sun, 2 Feb 2014 13:07:51 -0500 Tom Horsley wrote:
I'm very confused. If I run the gnome sound control, test speakers works fine. If I run "play", the sound plays normally. If I run "aplay", I got no sound till I rebooted, then aplay started to work, but if I run mplayer or youtube in google-chrome, I still get no sound.
More exceedingly random results:
VLC works OK, youtube in firefox works OK.
Has someone changed the audio interface and mplayer and google-chrome haven't been rebuilt yet?
Tom Horsley:
I'm very confused. If I run the gnome sound control, test speakers works fine. If I run "play", the sound plays normally. If I run "aplay", I got no sound till I rebooted, then aplay started to work, but if I run mplayer or youtube in google-chrome, I still get no sound.
More exceedingly random results:
VLC works OK, youtube in firefox works OK.
Has someone changed the audio interface and mplayer and google-chrome haven't been rebuilt yet?
aplay is the old alsa play utility, it may not be using pulse-audio, perhaps that's why it jams. Likewise with some other applications, they might not use pulse-audio, or might need configuring to do so.
On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 01:20:02 +1030 Tim wrote:
aplay is the old alsa play utility, it may not be using pulse-audio, perhaps that's why it jams. Likewise with some other applications, they might not use pulse-audio, or might need configuring to do so.
Nope, they all claim to be using pulse, and pulse thinks it is being used, because they all show up in the"Applications" tab in the sound control app. It is just that some apps generate sound and some only think they are generating sound. mplayer, for instance, prints the progress info exactly as if it is playing, but no sound comes out of the speakers.
On Sun, 2 Feb 2014 13:07:51 -0500 Tom Horsley wrote:
but if I run mplayer or youtube in google-chrome, I still get no sound.
I've been doing more experiments. I made a brand new user and logged in as him. He can get sound from mplayer and youtube, but only when logging into a gnome session.
If I login to a KDE session, I can't get any sound from anything (perhaps because I simply can't find the volume control in KDE and everything is muted?)
Since I new user worked, I tried moving my .config directory in my original user and logging in with a blank .config, but I still get no sound in mplayer.
It is still totally mysterious.
On 02/05/14 20:27, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Sun, 2 Feb 2014 13:07:51 -0500 Tom Horsley wrote:
but if I run mplayer or youtube in google-chrome, I still get no sound.
I've been doing more experiments. I made a brand new user and logged in as him. He can get sound from mplayer and youtube, but only when logging into a gnome session.
If I login to a KDE session, I can't get any sound from anything (perhaps because I simply can't find the volume control in KDE and everything is muted?)
Since I new user worked, I tried moving my .config directory in my original user and logging in with a blank .config, but I still get no sound in mplayer.
It is still totally mysterious.
I don't recall seeing any mention of your system's sound capabilities. In my case of I have 2 potential sound outputs one is a built-in "Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio" while the other is "Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation GK106 HDMI Audio Controller" located on my Graphics card...which is disconnected.
I use KDE. As such, to ensure I get sound under KDE I would have to bring up "systemsettings" go to "Multimedia--->Audio and Video Settings and ensure that "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" is at the top of the preference list for the playback. If HDMI is at the top, no sound....of course.
On Wed, 05 Feb 2014 20:47:27 +0800 Ed Greshko wrote:
I use KDE. As such, to ensure I get sound under KDE I would have to bring up "systemsettings" go to "Multimedia--->Audio and Video Settings and ensure that "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" is at the top of the preference list for the playback. If HDMI is at the top, no sound....of course.
Yea, I found that one and made HDMI the default (which is the only sound I have connected), but I didn't see any controls for setting volume level or muting/unmuting anywhere.
On 02/05/14 20:53, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Wed, 05 Feb 2014 20:47:27 +0800 Ed Greshko wrote:
I use KDE. As such, to ensure I get sound under KDE I would have to bring up "systemsettings" go to "Multimedia--->Audio and Video Settings and ensure that "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" is at the top of the preference list for the playback. If HDMI is at the top, no sound....of course.
Yea, I found that one and made HDMI the default (which is the only sound I have connected), but I didn't see any controls for setting volume level or muting/unmuting anywhere.
For that I simply use "pavucontrol". I use that instead of "kmix" since it allows me to place the volume at 153%.
Allegedly, on or about 05 February 2014, Ed Greshko sent:
For that I simply use "pavucontrol". I use that instead of "kmix" since it allows me to place the volume at 153%.
Caution with that... It works well, for dealing with too-quiet audio (audio that never, originally, reached maximum output, can be boosted up to maximum). But as soon as you play something that already was at full level, you're trying to boost it beyond what it can be boosted without heavy distortion, and it sounds awful. Not to mention painful. I've experienced that once too often.
If you have recurring problems with playing very quiet audio, it may be worth finding a player that can do automatic gain adjustment. Boosting low audio up to a better level, and not boosting already loud audio.
Almost as mysteriously as sound stopped working, it has now started working again. The default pulseaudio output has always been set to HDMI, but my motherboard does look like two separate audio devices to linux, so there were two "profiles".
Apparently some randomly selected collection of apps started being directed to the 2nd profile, because when I plugged in some earphones, sound came out of them when running the apparently silent apps.
I've set the 2nd profile to "off" rather than "headphones" and finally everyone seems to be using the same HDMI default output they should have been using all along.
The weird thing is that as part of my experiments, I created a brand new user and logged in with different kinds of sessions (GNOME 3, KDE, FVWM) and the collection of seemingly silent apps was different in each session.